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Congratulations!
Warren Beach Rentals
OwnerRez is now a corporate sponsor of VRMA! We've wanted to be a sponsor for a few years now, and we finally pulled the trigger. This means OwnerRez is now sponsoring both major industry associations - VRMA and ASTRHO. Whether you're a PM or homeowner, OwnerRez will be there.
For those of you that don't know who VRMA is, The Vacation Rental Management Association (VRMA) works worldwide to increase public awareness of vacation rentals. They provides best-in-class education, networking, and professional development opportunities to make a difference for you and your business.
VRMA works with policymakers to develop fair balanced regulations that benefit the global vacation rental marketplace. This is more important than ever with many local city council's placing ordinances on vacation rentals. Those property managers can rely on VRMA to provide sound advice and resources to combat these issues.
We are proud to be a sponsor and hope that many of you find VRMA to be a useful tool for your business.
We're pleased to announce that we have partnered with Chekin. The integration allows OwnerRez users the ability to provide automatic and contactless check-ins for guests.
About Chekin
Chekin helps hosts to automate and digitize the entire check-in process from the booking confirmation till the check-out.
They include identity verification using biometric match as an extra step in online check-in.
Hosts can save time, money and comply with the legal requirements by managing everything online.
Here is a list of reasons to use Chekin:
Get started with Chekin by visiting the Chekin website and check out the OwnerRez support doc for how to integrate OwnerRez with Chekin.
On Tuesday 3/16, join us for a focus session on the PM module!
Paul Waldschmidt, CEO of OwnerRez, will show how to set up owners, calculate commission and generate monthly statements quickly and easily.
The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez Focus Session On PM link to register.
You can find all of our past and future webinars on our Webinars page.
Happy Saturday!😃
This week we had three webinars! The first was our Dynamic Pricing Industry Expert webinar, where we discussed all the things to look for when selecting a dynamic pricing option. We highly recommend that anyone who is interested in dynamic pricing, watch the replay here. The second webinar was our weekly Demo Q & A session, and you can sign up for the next one here. Lastly, we had our ASTRHO Membership & Premier Host Benefits webinar, the replay can be watched here. There are a lot of informative webinars scheduled for March, you can view them all here.
If you live in Douglas County and operate an illegal vacation rental, you could be fined $20,000 and subject to a permanent ban from managing a vacation rental in the future. This change is one of nearly 50 different policy decisions Douglas County discussed Thursday. Another policy that may be implemented states that if someone falsifies a permit, they can be subject to criminal charges and receive a $20,000 fine. Douglas County is cracking down!
A new report from Airbnb explains how those with financial struggles, due to the pandemic, were able to stay afloat by renting out all or sections of their home. In fact, new Airbnb hosts who joined once Covid hit have collectivity earned more than $1 billion around the world! In the United States, new hosts in California earned $67 million, new hosts in Florida collected $42 million and New York new hosts earned $36 million. According to the same report, half of all Airbnb hosts have used their earning to stay in their homes and about 29% have used their Airbnb income to pay for their rent or mortgages.
Cathedral City, California has voted to phase out short-term rentals that are not home shares by January 1, 2023. This resolution also established a minimum-stay length of three nights, reduced occupancy to 10 guests and prohibits the use of outdoor amenities after 10:00 pm.
Now for some hopeful news! President Joe Biden has stated that the US should have enough vaccines by the end of May to treat every adult. This announcement came after Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot COVID vaccine received FDA approval for emergency use. Hopefully we can all get vaccinated and take a much needed vacation.🌴
Hey everybody, time to talk updates! This week, we've got a tidy little set of updates (about 16) to go through, all of which are enhancements or bug fixes. No new features to talk about, but the little stuff is important too! 💪
This was a small housekeeping week, so let's hop from lily pad to lily pad here in no particular order...
A long time ago, we mentioned getting rid of all references to "HomeAway". The parent company Expedia made it clear awhile back that they were shifting everything to the Vrbo name, and they even removed the homeaway.com domain name (it redirects to vrbo.com). We started the process of merging everything on our side to "Vrbo" (and spelled exactly like that) but the project got back-burned for awhile. We have now completed the process.
As you click around the app now, you'll notice that channels and settings now only reference "Vrbo" with the new Vrbo logo.
Even the listing site options in surcharge and trigger criteria only show Vrbo now. HomeAway is gone. The added benefit here is that you only need to select Vrbo to make sure your surcharges or triggers hit all HomeAway/Vrbo/Expedia bookings. In the past, some users would select HomeAway but not Vrbo and a trigger might not be sent to a booking that was specifically flagged as Vrbo. Now that they are merged, that should no longer happen.
Last fall, we forced everyone to move to the new rates system. For awhile, we kept the Legacy rates under the covers and watched the transition from old to new. After watching everything for a few months, we have now fully removed all references and code to the old Legacy rates system. I hope you're enjoying the new rates system! If not, let us know where the pain points are.
As tags are used by more and more users, we continue to find new places they can be used. This past week we added tags to Excel exports. Which exports, you ask? All of them of course! Any record that can have tags applied to it will show those same tags as columns on the Excel export.
Let's supposed you have two tags on your properties: Rural and Small and Cozy. When you export your list of properties to Excel, you'll see two columns at the end of the export with column names "Tag - Rural" and "Tag - Small and Cozy". Each row will have a true or false in the tag column depending on if the tag applies to that property.
This is super useful because it allows you to group, pivot and filter your export data by tags. While you may not have many properties, these tag columns will also show on bookings, quotes and guest exports which might have thousands of rows.
For you PMs, we also created a new Excel import for owners. You can now import owner records in bulk by using Excel. The new owner import is similar to our other Excel imports and can be found in the same area (Tools > Import/Export).
Recently, we updated our search page to be more powerful, find more items and show clearer search results. However, we noticed that the search page was redirecting to the guest record (ie. the guest conversation) and not the booking when most of the time the user is searching for booking information. We changed this so that searches that show bookings will stay on the search page and not redirect automatically. This will allow you to decide if you want to view the guest or booking instead of the system deciding for you.
We tweaked Booking.com prices to start extra guest fees at 1 instead of 0 even if your extra guest fees start at 0 (ie. you charge for all guests). We had to do this because Booking.com does not support 0 guests in the base price. Our API connection with Booking.com was returning errors for users that charge extra guest fees for all guests, so we set the minimum to 1 included. Sorry if this affects your pricing, but you'll have to take it up with Booking.com!
Airbnb requires max nights now. Airbnb no longer allows passing an empty value (ie. unlimited) for maximum nights, so we now pass 365 if your max nights rule is open-ended. To be clear, this was a bug with Airbnb, not us, but we "fixed" it anyway.
PayPal error messages. When connecting PayPal to OwnerRez, there are a variety of reasons you might get an error message - for instance your PayPal account is not a Business account or is too new. Instead of showing a general crash message, we now parse the inner error message being sent back from PayPal and attempt to show a clearer message.
Current dates are free when moving booking. When moving a booking, the move screen showed the current booking dates as unavailable, but that's not really accurate. If you're moving the booking, the current dates are also free as well because you could select other dates and then decide to switch back to the current dates. This has been fixed.
Require http or https on links. You've probably noticed that our link editor has improved greatly over the years. By link editor, I'm referring to the button that lets you create clickable links when editing an email template. You can select custom links or field codes. We noticed that sometimes links are being entered without a fully qualified URL - for instance, yahoo.com instead of http://www.yahoo.com. While both typically work in a browser, our editor has problems with the former and will sometimes change the URL under the covers. We changed this so that links are forced to include the http or https part of the URL.
Link editor not showing custom. Speaking of the link editor, we also fixed a situation where the link editor would open but not show "Custom Web Address" as the type when the link was a user-entered link.
Platform email addresses aren't real. Our CRM system is careful not to store platform emails (ie. the proxy email addresses the channels use like susy.123456789@messages.homeaway.com) on the guest record. This is because these email addresses aren't real and have zero value for marketing and future contact. However, we noticed a place in our payment system where platform email addresses were being saved after processing new payments. All good now!
Search not searching. We found and fixed a situation where some bookings were not sending guest names to the search system properly. This is fixed now. We are working on upgrading our search tools and looking forward to some more-powerful text-searching features in the future.
Previewing account system alerts. We noticed that some account system alerts (like payment collected or payment refunded) were not previewing correctly. Not cool, dude.
Rate calendar with no properties. Before you couldn't do that. If for some reason all your properties were disabled and you went to the rate calendar - bang, crash, boom! We fixed it. Now you're greeted by message to go turn on some properties first.
PM Statement expense criteria. Last week, we overhauled PM statements to have all the same settings that owner statements do. Only the expense criteria wasn't actually working as designed. All better now!
On Thursday 3/4, we'll sit down with the team at ASTRHO to discuss their membership and the premier host benefits.
ASTRHO was created to provide short-term and vacation rental homeowners easy access to education, community, experts, perks and benefits.
Anyone who attends the webinar will get 3 months of Premier Host Membership for free!
The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for ASTRHO Membership & Premier Host Benefits webinar link to register.
You can find all of our past and future webinars on our Webinars page.
Happy Friday!
Yesterday we released a huge blog that covers all 59 updates we pushed out. That's right, 59! We highly recommend checking that out. Now, let's dive into some industry news.
San Diego City Council pushed forward a yearly cap on vacation rentals. This cap would cut the volume of vacation rentals by as much as 30 percent. This new regulation still needs a second vote of the council before becoming a law. For all areas except Mission Beach, rentals would be capped at 1 percent of the city's total housing units, which equates to around 5,400. Mission Beach would have a much more generous rental cap due to its long history of vacation rentals.
The Island of Hawaii continues to have low tourism numbers. In January 2021, big island vacation rentals dipped below 50 percent capacity. On the other hand, hotels on the island had an average of 23.3 percent occupancy. Hopefully we can all get vaccinated and take a trip to Hawaii later this year.
In Cancun, vacation rentals are seeing higher occupancy than hotels. Hotels in the area are hovering around 30-40 percent occupancy, while vacation rental are seeing 40-50 percent on average. The influx of vacation rental travelers is most likely due to the ability to work remotely. According to Airbnb, many travelers who book outside of peak season tend to stay 28 nights or more.
Next week, OwnerRez will host not 1... not 2... but 3 webinars! The first is our Dynamic Pricing Industry Expert webinar with Alexander Shartsis, former Perfect Price CEO. If you've ever wanted to know more about dynamic pricing, this is the webinar for you. Then we have our weekly Demo Q&A session; come say hi! Our third webinar of the week will be with ASTRHO to talk about their membership and premium host benefits. Bonus (because we're so awesome): if you come to the webinar, we'll give you 3 months of premium for free!
Maybe, stating the "cancellation fee is XX Euros/USD" or "cancellation fee is xx% of the booking value" could be better options. There are cases we might not have yet charged the full amount but the cancellation fee would be 100% of the booking value. In such a case, saying "no refund" misleads the guest about the cancellation fee.
Re Cancellation Policy Text. I had a guest recently who saw no refunds and thought it also referred to the security deposit even though it was clear in the section above. I had a few emails back and forth to explain the security deposit was refunded. Or rather the hold on the card.
We can go on and on trying to cover every base but do you think changing the text to No Rental Refunds would help. It may not work for all scenarios?
I just now signed up via OR, somehow missing that it was as easy as a few clicks in the API Integration, but it took 2 months for them to get you connected?
On Tuesday 3/2, we'll sit down with Alexander Shartsis, former Perfect Price CEO, to discuss dynamic pricing.
We'll cover what you should expect, how involved you should be, and when to set up dynamic pricing. Knowing the answers to all the questions we'll cover, will help you grasp how to use dynamic pricing successfully.
The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for Dynamic Pricing Industry Expert webinar link to register.
You can find all of our past and future webinars on our Webinars page.
Happy Thursday, folks! 👋 Over the past couple of weeks, the blog has been silent about updates, but behind the scenes the updates have been pouring out at our normal ridiculous rate. We've got 59 updates to discuss, so no time to waste!
For years, OwnerRez has had the industry's most powerful calendar import/export (iCal) engine. Thousands of homeowners and PMs use our iCal engine to connect with channels, VR apps, third party contacts and calendar systems. Our iCal engine is known for its robustness and ability to handle many different edge cases, correcting common channel problems. The rise of API integrations has made iCal less necessary, but there are still important business needs that iCal can take care of better than anything else.
Over the years, many OwnerRez users have asked us to change how our iCal works so that they can share different types of information. For instance, there is a common request to make the guest's phone number or email address be the first line of the description or summary on the iCal event, which is used by a third party app to send an SMS alert or change a door code. Or you might want the guest's contact info limited to certain fields depending on who you're giving the iCal link to. You might want your housekeeper to see the guest's phone number but not their email address in the housekeeper's calendar system.
In typical OwnerRez fashion, we wanted to support all these scenarios and any others you might dream up, so we overhauled our iCal exports completely. We are proud to announce that you can now completely customize the content of your iCal exports in OwnerRez. To see the new changes, drill into any property and click the Calendars tab on the sidebar, then click the Calendar Exports tab. Like before, you can create as many Custom iCal Links as you want so that you're able to control what information each third party gets individually. Either click into an existing Custom iCal Link or create a new one.
You'll notice that the options are now different. You can embed the property name and location in the iCal event directly, which will make it a clickable address in your calendar system. Below that, the Summary and Description now allows you to fine-tune what is displayed based on a new array of options including new options for notes and custom fields.
If you select the "I'll define using field codes" mode, the screen will show you a set of text boxes so that you can completely control the content.
To get started, click the "Prefill" button that appears at the top. This will automatically generate some text with field codes to show you how the summary and description might be laid out.
From there, you can add your own text, move stuff around or insert other field codes. You have complete control to do what you want.
Wondering how your changes will look? We've got you covered on that too. Click the "Preview" button at the top, and we'll show you how your iCal content will look using real bookings.
The Summary and Description fields are a standard part of iCal and what other calendar systems (like Google Calendar or Outlook) show in the title and body of their calendar events. What you customize here is what will show on that side.
Here's a quick example of a custom Summary with field codes and how it appears when I import it into Google Calendar:
Remember that iCal tends to be cached by third parties which means it's slow to update, so if you make changes to your content, make sure the other calendar system really updated before wondering what's wrong. In some calendars, like Google Calendar, it can take a long time (even days) before the iCal content is refreshed. It is often better to simply delete the old link and make a new one.
Another awesome thing we just released is our new Verified Email Domains feature.
Most OwnerRez homeowners and PMs already use a custom domain name for their email address. As an example, let's use a cabin owner named "Mike" who runs Mountain Cabins Inc. You probably already know that Mike should use an email address like "mike@mountaincabins.com" instead of something like "mikemtcabins@gmail.com". Not only does the former look more professional, but it also advertises Mike's website and helps Mike build his brand. The problem is that in order for OwnerRez to send email on behalf of Mike, the mountaincabins.com domain name has to officially tell the world "I give permission for OwnerRez to send email using me as the domain name". In modern times, email service providers (like Gmail or Yahoo) check DNS records on the domain name of the email address to see which domain names have allowed which apps to send on their behalf. This separates scammers from legit apps. So to make sure that our emails are delivered with a high rate of fidelity, and to maintain your sending reputation, we diligently require you to add those DNS records.
In the past, we manually did this for users by letting you add a single "Verified Sender Address" to your account after going through a manual mapping process with our email provider and your domain registrar. Many of you know what I mean because you already did this by going back and forth with our help desk. But doing things manually sucks and we wanted users to have more versatility, so we created a fully automated end-to-end process where you can verify as many domain names as you want (directly yourself) and send emails from any of them at any time.
To see the changes, go to Settings > Verified Email Domains and click in. If you already had a verified email address in the past, we've migrated that to the new system for you, and you'll see your domain name in the list.
Click into your existing domain name to drill in. You'll see a bunch of technical mumbo-jumbo.
This mumbo-jumbo is the aforementioned DNS records that have to be maintained on your domain name so that the world knows OwnerRez is a legit sender for you. If you remember back to when you did the manual mapping with our help desk, these were the DNS records we had you put in place. You'll also notice that there is a Status field with Verified or Not Verified showing. You want both Status fields to be green and Verified all the time. If they switch to red and Not Verified, OwnerRez will not longer send email using your domain name. We'll still send the same email out, but we'll swap in a different domain name as the FROM header on the message. OwnerRez automatically monitors your DNS records. If they stop working or are removed, we'll automatically switch the Verified Domain to Unverified and send you an email.
If you don't have an existing domain name already in there, no worries - you can add one now. Go back out to the Verified Email Domains list again and click the "Verify Domain" button. It will ask you to put in your domain name and then save.
After saving, you'll be presented with a screen of instructions that will tell you what you need to do. Notice the links in the instruction box. The Postmark help article will give you specific step-by-step help, so read that. If you are asking your domain provider or registrar for help, you can also use the second link to share the DNS records with them (red arrow below).
There's a convenient copy button there you can use to copy the URL and email it to your tech person or paste it into a chat window with your domain registrar. Make sure to tell them to click on the link and open it. This provides a public page where anyone can see what you need to verify, see the DNS records to put in place and click a button to verify the changes. The tech guy or domain registrar should easily be able to make the necessary changes by looking at the page we provide.
You can verify as many email domains as you want and OwnerRez will use all of them as long as they remain in Verified status. Wondering where to set the actual FROM email address on your account? Just set that on the theme or template like you normally would. If your themes or email templates have a FROM address that does not match the verified email domains on your account, OwnerRez will use a different FROM address when sending the message until your domain name is verified.
Please note that you must own and use a custom domain name for this to work. Using a Gmail or Yahoo email address will not work because you cannot control DNS records for those domain names. Likewise, the email address provided by someone else (eg. military email, Verizon, college email) won't work either for the same reason. You must be able to, personally, manage the domain name for this to work. If you need to buy a domain name, we recommend Namecheap as an inexpensive-yet-solid domain registrar and you can use our Namecheap partner link to do that at any time.
Moving on, let's talk about new PM stuff!
A couple weeks ago, we released a huge update for PM configuration and statements that caused some shock-waves throughout our PM community. The update included a number of "breaking changes" by its nature. When generating statements, many PMs used the old between-and selectors to cut off months in the past even thought those months had bookings and expenses waiting to remit. As we explained in the update, the between-and selector had to be removed because of the financial havoc and confusion it caused down-stream. But that led to new problems as hundreds of old bookings started re-appearing on statements with no way to remove them. Over the past couple of weeks, as we worked with our PM community and addressed their issues, we released a number of updates to streamline things so that the new update would work more effectively while also providing tools to cleanup historical errors.
The first major thing we did was deal directly with the issue of historical bookings re-appearing on new statements.There has always been the ability to select bookings on the owner statement and exclude them, but that exclusion was temporary. On the next statement, those same bookings would pop up all over again.
Ultimately, the correct method of dealing with old bookings re-appearing is to go to each of those bookings, individually, and figure out what kind of bookings they are why they are appearing. There are two reasons why old bookings are appearing when they shouldn't be, and each of those reasons has a different solution:
1) The booking is an historical booking that doesn't need to be part of the PM system and shouldn't be included on any statement ever.
If this is the case, you can fix this in two ways:
Again, this is only for bookings that were never remitted in the first place and should never have been picked up by the PM system. If a booking was part of a previous owner statement, and now has a different balance, that booking should continue to be marked as "managed" and not turned off. Turning it off will attempt to take back the money from the owner.
2) The booking was already remitted to the owner, on a previous statement, but now contains some change in the owner balance so the PM system is trying to remit the difference.
If this is the case, you need to look at the individual booking and determine what changed. Trying to make the booking go away, without fixing the underlying balance, is discouraged from an accounting standpoint. Often, the booking is easy to figure out such as a change in commission that was accidentally set after the fact or a host fee that is being newly expensed to the owner.
If you cannot fix the bookings to remove the owner balance, or there are simply too many to do and you just want them gone, we now have an option for that as well. You can now select and exclude specific bookings and expenses to be removed from statements, and you can also "exclude forever" which flags the booking or expense to never be picked up again. This can be done for both booking and expense line items when in preview mode. In the pic below, I have previewed a statement, selected some expenses and and clicked the "Exclude" button. I see the option to exclude temporarily or exclude forever.
Please note that:
In case you missed it above, excluding expenses is now possible in addition to bookings. You can now select and exclude both bookings and expenses.
Our new Owner Statement Bookings Remittance report now provides PMs with details about specific statement line items across wide date ranges. However, we noticed that it did not include a column that showed when the statement was generated. For instance, you might want to pivot or group line items by the statement they were part of or see when the remittance was generated so that you know why certain payments were included. We added a new Statement Created date column to the Owner Statement Bookings Remittance report to give you that information.
We also added a By Statement Date field to owner statements to clarify the real percentage of time being prorated. Previously we had an In Period percentage but that's misleading and ambiguous because the booking may not be in the statement period at all but need to be 100% remitted. For instance, the statement period could be all of January (1st - 31st) but the booking occurred at the end of December. In Period would be 0% but By Statement Date would be 100%, and so the entire booking should be remitted. You now have access to both fields for additional clarity, and both fields can be selected in custom statement views as well.
We also added an Owner filter to the main bookings list view so that you can find all bookings by owner only (ie. not by property). This matters because a property might now be owned by different owners based on the historical timeline, so filtering by property is not sufficient to return all of an owner's bookings. By adding a new Owner filter, you can now grab bookings by owner, bypassing the property.
We added field codes for Month, Day and Year of the statement as separate codes so that PMs can customize their owner statements better. There was already a field code for Statement Date but that would render out on the statement as the full date. Sometimes PMs want to show "Statement for January 2021" without the day and the new field codes allow you to do that.
Another common complaint we addressed is the issue of last minute payments not appearing on owner statements. Our statement generation checks what amount the guest paid and the date of when the payment came in to know if a booking is able to be included on a statement. You can read more about why that is necessary on our "why aren't bookings being included" support blurb. The problem is that sometimes payment do come in before the statement is generated even though the statement is dated a few days before that. For example, suppose we're running statements for end of January so the statement date is January 31. However, we're generating the statements a few days later on February 5th. In those 5 days, the payment for a January booking came in, so the payment is in hand. Previously, the system would not include that booking in the owner statement because the payment was after the January 31 statement date. To fix this, we updated our statement logic to check the generation date instead of the statement date to grab any last minute bookings that had payments come in after the end of the month. This allows you to include the full array of bookings, so that the owner doesn't wonder why stuff is missing. And if you want to exclude those bookings for some reason, you still can - use the exclude option mentioned above (but only the temporary option).
After doing all that stuff to owner statements, we turned our attention to PM statements. Owner statements have gotten numerous updates over the last few months, but PM statements have lagged behind. We caught up the PM statement side to have all the same criteria, features and options that owner statements have. Here's a quick list:
We also added a field to expenses that are linked to booking fees, showing the fee, so that you can quickly see and click across to the booking fee. This is similar to how expenses are linked to booking charges and show which charge the expense is linked to.
Last new feature in the PM is the ability to un-void expenses. We noticed that when users went to clean up their expenses, they were sometimes deleting expenses that were remitted on statements which in turn voided the expense. Expenses that are remitted on statements cannot be deleted, so we turn the delete into a void instead. However, if the user needed to reverse that, there was no way of doing it. Go to any voided expense, and you'll see a new Unvoid button showing at the top.
We also added a Voided field with a timestamp as well so that you can see when exactly it was voided. This should help you reverse anything you accidentally reversed previously! 🤔
As OwnerRez continues to grow - and we've been doing a lot of that lately! - we're working to add tools that help new users bring their data from other systems. Or you might want to work with your existing OwnerRez data but in a faster way. To that end, we've added new Excel imports for both Importing Properties and Owners. This is exactly what it sounds like and follows our normal spreadsheet model in the normal import/export area. These imports will allow you to quickly bring in new properties and owners into OwnerRez, or update existing ones, with a variety of fields. You won't be able to update all the listing data this way, but there are columns for most of the common fields we support. As usual, we supply a starting Excel template you can use to get started. From there, copy/paste your data over and then massage it to match our columns.
The last feature to mention is a new Government Identification section on the account profile. As we grow, OwnerRez continues adding users in many countries around the world. (In fact, did you know we have users in more than 150 countries now? Yep!) But some of those countries have special ID, VAT, NIF type fields that they require to be shown on invoices. We want our OwnerRez invoices (the ones you pay for using our service) to be official so we added a setting to the profile area so that you can set what your country's particular number is. And if it's set, we then show it on the invoice.
Let's start off the tweaks section by talking about Airbnb....
First, we switched our Airbnb IDs to use 64 bit numbers. That's tech mumbo-jumbo for saying that we upgrading our API connection to match some changes that Airbnb is making to their numbering system. If you're curious, a 64 bit number is really big - like big enough to hold 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 (billions x billions) as a maximum number. Apparently, Airbnb has grown a little in the waist and needs to let their belt out. We made sure OwnerRez is ready for the change.
Second, we added the "Lux" cancellation policies to our Airbnb settings. If you have a Lux property, you can now select the correct Lux cancellation policy to go with it.
Next, we removed absolute value (per-night) LOS discounts for Airbnb. To be clear, you can still set these in OwnerRez because we know that your vacation rental world doesn't just revolve around Airbnb, and we're cool like that. But for Airbnb, we no longer push absolute value (per-night) LOS discounts. If you have them, we'll skip over them when we push rates to Airbnb.
Then, we clarified that the "Laptop Friendly" amenity is a workspace. Some very clever (and very detailed? 🤨) user pointed out that saying "Laptop Friendly" on its own could imply that the guest can use a laptop at the property which... is pretty much every property with a Wifi connection, right? We added wording to make it Laptop Friendly Workspace instead.
Finally, we added support for Airbnb's new "default LOS discounts" feature by treating all LOS discounts without date criteria as default. Specifically, we examine all LOS discounts in your account and ignore any that are exactly 7 nights or 28 nights (which are handled by the weekly/monthly LOS settings already) and then set the others as defaults. If none are found, we pass an empty flag to Airbnb so that the defaults are cleared on their side.
Over on the HomeToGo channel, we noticed that the property mappings didn't link to the live listings which is something that HomeToGo does support, so we updated the page to support that. If you put in the HomeToGo identifier mapping on your properties, we'll show it on the dashboard and a link where you can quickly go to see your HomeToGo listing live.
Cancellation policies have gotten a few enhancements as well. First, we clarified the longer legal version to include the "(less $xxx cancellation fee)" blurb at the end, and then we also added a new clause that dynamically shows what is available to be refunded based on the dates of the quote or booking relative to now. For instance, if the booking has an arrival date of June 23rd and the cancellation policy is 50% refunded outside of 60 days, then the quote will show that the 50% refund happens before April 24th but nothing is refunded after April 24th. Like this:
Once April 25th rolls around, the same quote would show "No refunds". Like this:
The idea here is to give guests some specific language about the dates they need to watch out for and create an air-tight case that you disclosed the refund policy if a credit card chargeback occurs.
This new dynamic date-based language can also be used in renter agreements or messaging templates via a new field code called {BCANPOLDAT}. Drop that baby into any template and you'll get the same language that is shown in the pictures above.
Over in portal access land, we cleaned up a few things so that managing portal access is easier. We noticed that portal access users stuck around even when their access was removed with no way of hiding them. We now hide portal access users that have no access granted, so if you remove access you're no longer bothered by extra users hanging around. You still can't delete them, but at least they're hidden now. We also made sure to check if owners are linked to portal access before allowing you to delete them. We found a rare edge case where that was being allowed.
In our Communication History area (under Tools) you can see all outbound messaging history across email, SMS and Airbnb. And for SMS and Airbnb, you can see inbound as well. This is an extremely useful feature because it shows the actual messages being sent out to guests so you can see if something was missed or what it looked like on the way out the door. And for email, you can see if the recipient opened or read it sometimes too. One of the cool things we show is the template and trigger that were used if the message was sent with a template or trigger. We noticed though that SMS and Airbnb messages were not showing this information, so we updated SMS and Airbnb messages to show (and link) to the templates and triggers they are sent with.
A couple other little tweaks...
We added a "any stay during period" option to all line item reports, so now you can query records where the booking touches the date range you are filtering. Before you could only target bookings that arrived or departed in the date range, but now you can grab anything that touches the period.
We noticed that some of our more creative tech-savvy users were having problems using our rich-text editors when it came to certain markup and formatting. This was because our rich-text editor has certain restrictions in place to keep the formatting clean. But the restrictions were a little too restrictive, and we love the creativity of our users, so we expanded the rules to allow more rich-text. In tech-speak, you can now use any attribute parameter on <div> and <span> elements. Keep being creative! Keep pushing the boundaries!
My property, but not my booking! We recently updated our property/owner configuration stuff and, in the process, forgot that a property can now have different owners at different times. This means that each booking needs to be looked at, one by one, on the poral access side instead of the entire property. Otherwise, a current owner might see all the bookings of a previous owner. We fixed this to only show the applicable bookings.
Extra inquiries and quotes. The same owner configuration changes also made it so that some inquiries and quotes were duplicating on the inquiry and quote lists. There weren't extra inquiries or quotes being created. The same inquiries and quotes were being shown multiple times. This has been fixed.
No setting, no problem. You can add criteria on surcharges and triggers for many things like "number of nights > 7", but some users forget to add the actual value (eg. 7). We now ignore this instead of throwing an error. If the criteria is incomplete, we allow the surcharge to work, but that piece of criteria is simply ignored.
Selecting hidden seasons. Did you know you can change the Season Rates editor to only show certain properties and seasons when you're editing? Yep! Only we noticed a bug where selecting across seasons would also select the hidden seasons (ie. those filtered out), and then rates were being set across all of them. All fixed now!
Scheduled payment collected when? Typically, scheduled payments will show the approximation of when they will be collected. We changed this to show the actual date after the scheduled payment was processed.
Last statement deleting. Under the covers, our new PM/owner statement system now tracks the start/end period for each statement as well as the previous statement relative to any statement. Only we noticed that when a statement was deleted, the reference to the previous statement was not properly updating, so we fixed that.
Next statement date after deleting. Similar to the previous issue, after deleting an owner statement, the next statement you generate was showing a Statement Date that continued into the future
Theme Header/Footer clearing. Ever try to clear (ie. remove all the content from) a header of footer in the Themes area? It probably gave you an error. We fixed this to delete the section instead of throwing crashing.
Owner field codes on blocks. In a recent update, we moved a bunch of field codes around and in the process dropped owner field codes from blocked-off times. We added those back so you now set owner field codes in blocked-off times again.
Missing Instruction Manual text. We have a field code for the Instruction Manual field on properties so that you can include it in website pages, email templates and so on. However, our Instruction Manual field is rich text which doesn't work in plain text templates such as the ones used by Airbnb or SMS. When that happens, our field code system is supposed to automatically transform the rich-text field into plain text, stripping out the pretty formatting, but that wasn't happening for the Instruction Manual field. This has been fixed.
Mountain Lodging 2 .com's? Our Hosted Website feature has a several templates you can use to prefill your headers and menus. The Mountain Lodging template had a typo where there were two .com's on the "Admin Login" link, so we corrected that.
Incorrect In Period %. Up above, I mentioned that we added a new By Statement Date column to owner statements for clarity. After adding this, we noticed that our In Period column was displaying things a tad off, in terms of the number of days actually in the statement period, so we fixed that too.
What about old bookings? The recent PM overhaul made it so that you can configure different owners at different times and, when you change it, the system recommends changes that should be made to various bookings. However, we noticed that resetting the original owner (ie. deleting all owners on the timeline and setting a new one) did not recommend changes to historical bookings that may need to be un-managed before that, so we fixed it to look at those bookings too.
Disconnecting QuickBooks. There are multiple ways to disconnect our QuickBooks integration, and if you do it from the QuickBooks side (ie. go to QuickBooks first, find the Apps > OwnerRez connection and hit the kill switch) it's supposed to bring you back to OwnerRez. It was correctly coming back to OwnerRez, but not showing the right final confirmation message, so fixed it.
QuickBooks payments being deleted. Speaking of QuickBooks, we uncovered a bug where users with "don't push payments" turned on were still having payments deleted when our sync ran. We fixed this so that payments aren't deleted or set if don't push is turned on.
Channel Bridge 65-character addresses. Channel Bridge import was crashing when it tried to import addresses that were exactly 65 characters long for some reason, but all better now!
Quotes and Google Analytics tracking. We recently updated our Google Analytics integration to supposed the new GA4 standard. But we noticed it wasn't working on quote acceptance forms, so we updated that too!
Statement period showing. Every PM and owner statement has a "period" with a start and end date, but we don't show it to you in the app. It's recorded under the covers. Recently, we noticed that we were accidentally showing a Period field when generating multiple owner statements in batch. That has been hidden.
Unmanaging past bookings instead of future. When we added the ability to un-manage bookings in bulk, we accidentally left the date criteria aimed at future date ranges. The common process is to un-manage past/historical bookings, not future ones, so we flipped that around. If you go the other way, and set bookings as managed, the date range still aims at future bookings.
Switching words. Little cleanup/consistency in the PM configuration area - when future change are coming, we now call it "switch".
Bottom padding on hosted sites. We added a little padding to the bottom of the Logged In admin bar that shows on hosted websites because some browsers (mostly Safari) occasionally hide the bar or push it around depending on the page content. All good now.
Owner-only expenses. Most of the time, expenses are entered against a booking or property, but sometimes you need to expense something against the owner at large. This is perfectly possible in OwnerRez, but a couple of our PM reports weren't showing those types of expenses in certain situations. This has been fixed.
How many days in a season? We found and fixed an issue where "everything but" logic on seasons was calculating an extra day when selecting the seasons to exclude. This was affecting both Airbnb and Vrbo API integrations.
Auto-PM Lock and future payments. We noticed an issue where a booking was being fully remitted on statements and having PM Lock automatically turned on, but the booking still had future payments scheduled. There are some rare-but-possible scenarios where this can happen. We changed PM Lock to only turn on automatically if the booking is 100% remitted and no future payments are scheduled to be collected.
WordPress plugin sanitizing. We noticed some users that are using are WordPress plugin were sending string values instead of integers when generating quotes, so we updated our WordPress plugin to detect this and clean it up on the fly. Don't know what a "string value" is? I didn't think so, but hey something works now that didn't before. More tech mumbo-jumob! 😀
Happy Friday! Hopefully this week felt like it went by a little faster thanks to Presidents Day.
Next week we have our webinar with NASTRA (Nashville Area Short Term Rental Association), which you can register for here. We also have our weekly Demo Q&A session, which you can sign up for here.
Look out for fake Vrbo vacation rentals! Recently Vrbo user, Paul Trosclair, booked a month long stay at a rental in Louisiana. The host required him to check in at 9:00 pm, which Paul told the host he wouldn't be able to do, but the host turned ghost and Paul showed up the next day at 9:00 am. Turns out, after speaking to the property manager of the address he was sent, there was no vacation rental property and the PM had never heard of the owner. Yikes!
This lead to a back and forth with Vrbo who sided with the owner and denied a refund due to a breach of contract, since Paul did not show up at 9:00 pm for check-in... This lead Paul to reach out to Elliott Advocacy who investigated the claims. Elliott Advocacy confirmed that this in fact was a scam. There was no rental property, even proving that the photos on Vrbo were from an Airbnb listing located in Atlanta, 580 miles from where the supposed property should be.
Once they presented the evidence to Vrbo, a full refund was given to Paul and the listing was removed from Vrbo. Long story short, be prepared to prove you're right or a fake owner will win by default.
Florida has seen a 34% drop in visitors compared to 2020. Visit Florida, the states tourism-marketing agency, released data that showed 86.714 million people visited the state in 2020. That may sounds like a lot, but that's the lowest annual total since 2010. Airbnb occupancy went from 40.33% in 2019 to 37.7% in 2020. If you compare that to hotels, motels and resorts in the area, they dropped from 65.8% to 48.6%.
Arcata, California has passed a new ordinance that places a 100 unit cap on vacation rentals. Councilmembers voted 4-0 to pass regulation in attempt to preserve neighborhood settings. All owners must obtain a permit and provide contact information. Any owners currently operating have a 90 day grace period to abide.
Just got a message from HTG to begin my integration - I signed up after the initial announcement from ORez back in December. The contract says 2.5% commission after the 0% promo period for full integration and 14% for partial integration.
If we use the ORez API to push all info I assume this would be full integration - can you confirm this Paul W? You must have missed being asked this question above so I thought I'd ask again.
On Tuesday 2/23, OwnerRez will be hosting a webinar with NASTRA to go over how to make the most of OwnerRez.
We'll discuss with Alece Ronzino from NASTRA (Nashville Area Short Term Rental Association) all the best practices for messaging guests and more! From sending point of contact forms to easily setting up your own hosted website, we'll demo it live!
The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez/NASTRA webinar link to register.
You can find all of our past and future webinars on our Webinars page.
Not liking that the between dates option was removed from Owner Statements. i didn't mind selecting or unselecting a reservations or 2 if they didn't apply for that statement but no I have all previous bookings showing up and PM unlock is not working so I can't unmanage those bookings to exclude them as was suggested. I just found this out today when I need to run statements pay my owners. This is a real mess.
Thanks SO much for these great new features. Just so much appreciate having notes for guests. Makes it easier for all our repeat guests to track things we learn about them.
Good news, it's Friday and Presidents Day weekend!
This week we had our Airbnb tax webinar. Caroline Robbins, Connectivity Partnerships Manager at Airbnb, showed how to properly configure your taxes and answered a lot of excellent questions. If you'd like to watch the webinar you can do so here. Also, make sure to check out our weekly demo webinars. The next is scheduled for February 18th!
Tallahassee is back again fighting the local governments on the regulation of vacation rentals. This fight has been going on for years, but now the revival of a proposal by house and senate leaders has fueled the fire. The proposal would prevent cities and counties from inspecting and providing licensing for properties listed on platforms such as Airbnb. The measure would force listing platforms to collect and remit taxes, only allow properly licensed rentals and provide the state with information about the rentals. Currently the state of Florida has bans in place to disallows local governments from creating ordinances that would outlaw vacation rentals. Grab your popcorn - this is far from over! 🍿
In Expedia Groups earning call this week (you know, the people who run Vrbo) Expedia announced the removal of Vrbo from Google's vacation rental meta product. The reasoning behind this is to focus on driving direct traffic to the Vrbo website. Expedia also stated they had raised their performance marketing spend for Vrbo. Monkey see, monkey do? Airbnb removed their listing from Google back in August. The irony is amusing... The major channels don't want Google interfering with their direct traffic but they have no problem interfering with your (PM and owner) direct traffic.
Hawaii has seen a significant decrease in short-term rentals. Due to the pandemic, the island of Oahu had the largest decrease of about 49%, which is about half as many as 2019. The overall rental supply on the islands has decreased about 43%. Even though Hawaii has reopened for tourism, experts say it could take years for the industry to recover. We wish the best of luck for those still listing in Hawaii.
Ugh not a fan of losing "created by" option. My agreements with clients are "you get paid when I get paid. No waiting like ABB or VRBO." I hold a reserve to cover cancellation issues but honestly this change is not entirely beneficial.
Good news, it's Friday and Super Bowl Sunday this weekend!
If you don't know already, OwnerRez will be hosting a webinar with Airbnb to discuss taxes. Who doesn't LOVE taxes? 😍 We'll sit down with Caroline Robbins, Connectivity Partnerships Manager at Airbnb, and go through how to properly configure your taxes for Airbnb. The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez/Airbnb webinar link to register.
Phoenix, Arizona proposed legislation that would penalize short-term rental hosts that violate their local health and safety laws. This would give local cities the ability to charge fines and other penalties, when a vacation rental becomes a nuisance to the community. Each time a host is in violation of these laws, the penalties will increase. Repeat offenders who have three violations in a 12-month period, can have their short-term rental license revoked by the state.
City authorities aren't the only ones who think this is a good idea; Airbnb fully supports the new proposal. In fact, last year Airbnb removed or suspended 50 listings in Arizona for complaints caused by parties or other policy violations. Look out Phoenix, you better keep your guests in line.
Who doesn't love visiting islands? Now that California is beginning to lift it's stay at home orders, Catalina island, off the coast of Los Angeles, has reopened to tourists. The Catalina Express ferry has resumed daily service for passengers from Long Beach and, on weekends, from San Pedro and Dana Point. Catalina relies on tourism, which is why they are trying to capitalizing on the upcoming holidays, President's Day and Valentine's day (don't forget, fellas), along with Spring Break vacations.
Cape Coral, Florida, wants to make life easier for people who own rental properties. The City Council is discussing a one time payment fee of just $35 for long-term and short-term rental properties. This one time $35 fee would be the lowest among Florida cities that require registration. The city says this would make it easier for Police to address an issue with the PM or owner responsible for the property.
Have a great weekend, eveyone, and go---!! Tampa Bay? Kansas City? 🏈
"YUUUGE" is right! This is amazing, y'all! Thank you!
On Tuesday 2/9, OwnerRez will be hosting a webinar with Airbnb to discuss taxes.
We'll sit down with Caroline Robbins, Connectivity Partnerships Manager at Airbnb, and go through how to properly configure your taxes for Airbnb.
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.
Hi everyone! We've got a YUUUGE one this week. We released so much, it took two release days that cover a total of 39 updates, headlined by some major PM and owner updates. Let's get to it! 🚀
Over the past 6 months, we've frequently mentioned that our PM area is getting a lot of attention. While we continue to work on other things - messaging, channels, websites - the PM area has a number of fundamental changes coming that will increase your ability to manage bookings and manage owners while simplifying the statement generation and reporting process. Some of these changes will add new functionality, and others will simplify what was already there.
The first major thing we did was to fundamentally change how owners, and their commission settings, are configured against properties. Instead of setting a single owner and commission amount, you can now change owners and commission amounts over time while maintaining the historical timeline. For example, when a property is sold to a new owner, you can now set a new Effective Date for when the new owner takes over while leaving the current owner in place. When the effective date arrives, the new owner's settings will take over for bookings that are arrive from that moment forward. The same is true when changing the current owner's commission amount. If the current owner is staying the same but you're charging a higher commission (yay!) you can put in an Effective Date for when the new commission takes effect.
Owner configuration was moved to the property itself, so you'll notice a PM Settings tab on each property with the owner configuration inside it. Head over there to take a look. You'll see the owner along with their current settings. Click the Change button to make a change with an upcoming Effective Date.
Let's assume that today is January 1st. In the above example, we're saying that as of the upcoming date of March 1st, the owner is switching to "Cardigan Capital" and the commission to 20%. The current owner is not being changed and will remain in the system for all time relative to the time that owner owned the property. After saving, we see the current owner with how it will change in the near future.
As time moves along and the effective date passes, the same page will show the new owner as the current owner and the previous owner will show as in the past. Any series of changes will be shown in the Ownership Changes table below the current owner.
Spin through your properties and make sure the owners and commission amounts are correct for your properties going back in time. If you once removed an owner, because the property was sold to someone else, you can now safely put back that original owner and note when the new owner took ownership. Please note that ownership configuration changes have to be made in order, so if you're putting back a previous owner, you must first delete the current owner, correct the owner before that and then put back the new owner.
While we were changing this area, we added another super cool feature. When you change your owner configuration, OwnerRez will now instantly evaluate all your existing bookings and recommend immediate changes based on what you changed. If the owner is changing in a few months, shouldn't the bookings that arrive after that point also be changed so that they belong to the new owner? If you're increasing or decreasing commission, shouldn't bookings reflect that as well? Now we show those recommendations inline and give you buttons where you can immediately take action.
In the above example, we see a common scenario where the property has changed owners effective as of some date in the future. At the time the change is saved, OwnerRez instantly looked at all bookings within the affected date range and shows bookings that appear to be wrong. Since the owner is changing to Cardigan on February 1, these bookings (shown above) that still belong to the previous owner JSK Properties should probably change to Cardigan since these bookings arrive after February 1. OwnerRez won't change them without your confirmation, but you can now see the recommendations right away and change them in a single click. The same is true if you changed commission amounts or some other setting.
In case you were wondering, the Configuration page under the PM menu still exists, but we changed it to be informational only. You cannot change owners, or owners' settings, from this area, but you can see all the properties side by side and see their owners. You can also see future updates.
In the above example, we see that Bear Timbers is getting an owner (ie. going from un-managed to managed) on March 1, and Expedia Property is changing commission amounts. Clicking the green property link on the Configuration page will take you to the property's owner configuration area where you can see and make changes.
Now let's talk about statements! We spent many weeks debating internally how to stop a number of common statement generation problems. One of the big problems we faced was the issue of old/historical bookings coming up on new statements when you first go to generate owner statements. If you've spent any time generating statements with our PM module, you probably know what I mean. Another problem was the issue of overlapping bookings where the PM expects bookings that overlap two months to be picked up but pro-rated and then picked up again the next month.
In the past, to give PMs a quick way of cutting up months, we had a "between...and" selector that would let you select the start and end date of a month (or any other date range) which would then only include bookings in that range. Over time, we realized that the "between...and" selector was insidious and caused more problems than it fixed. Not only did this not address proration accurately, but it dropped bookings that should have been picked up in multiple statements. To create a path of success, we made the decision to remove the "between...and" selector from statement generation completely. In its place, we streamlined the other options, which highlight the real world scenarios PMs face, and we added a Batch Update tool that will allow PMs to bulk un-manage (ie. turn off) old bookings that keep appearing. We'll talk about the Batch Update tool in a minute, but first let's look at the new streamlined generation options.
When generating statements, you can now select one of four criteria options for including bookings shown below:
The first two options are similar in that they pick up any booking with an arrival that occurs prior to the statement date. The only difference is that if a booking overlaps and has a departure after the statement date, the first option will pro-rate the owner's amount while the second option will still remit the full owner amount.
The third option is similar but it looks strictly at the departure date only. So if a booking arrived prior to the statement date but departed after, that entire booking will be ignored until the following statement.
The last option will include all bookings regardless of date. If you're wondering why this is an option, there are some PMs and owners that have an arrangement to remit all booking money, even for future bookings a year out, because the owner does not want that money sitting with the PM for long periods of time. Perhaps, the owner has 10 or 15 properties under management and is worried about a large amount of money held in trust. If those future booking are cancelled, the cancelled one is taken back in future statements since the booking would have zero owner money but was already remitted. OwnerRez keeps track of how much was remitted to an owner versus what should be remitted and can correct both up and down.
The most common option is the first one, and if you're not sure what to use, we recommend that you use the first option. To be clear, only bookings with an owner balance are picked up by statements and only if the booking meets a number of other checks. If you're wondering why bookings aren't showing on a statement, take a look at our help article on why bookings aren't showing on a statement.
If you're wondering how to "cut off previous bookings" because old bookings are showing up on a new statement, that should be handled by setting those old bookings to "un-managed". Up above, I mentioned how setting the owner's effective date on each property will automatically show you old bookings to be turned off, but there is now a way you can batch update many bookings at once to be un-managed. To do that, take a look at the Batch Update Bookings for Commission area under the PM menu. This tool already existed, but we expanded it so that you could select what you want to do - manage, un-manage or recalculate - to the group of bookings you're targeting.
If old bookings shouldn't be included in owner statements, use this tool to select those properties, set a starting date in the "On or before" option and then run the update to un-manage those bookings. OwnerRez will find those bookings and turn them off. Then, go back and generate a new owner statement, and those bookings will no longer appear. Be careful when selecting dates and properties to target the correct bookings. If you make a mistake, no worries - you can use this same tool to find and "set managed" the bookings that were accidentally turned off.
While we were in here, we tweaked some other statement-related things.
As mentioned in our help article about why bookings aren't included in statements, we look at payment data on each booking to determine if a booking has been paid by the guest and, if so, how much. This is important because OwnerRez does not want to remit money to an owner if you (the PM) have not actually received the money from the guest. There are a number of situations where this can occur. So each booking is checked to make sure that payments have been entered, with past dates, for each booking that is picked up.
Over time, we noticed an interesting pattern... PMs often generate statements at the beginning of the month for the previous month. For example, the PM might be generating statements on February 4th for all of January so the statement date is January 31. As explained, the statement generation engine looks at payment dates to see what payment have come in by the statement date (which in this example is January 31) but often there are payments that came in for bookings at the beginning of the month. In this same example, let's suppose a booking arrived on January 28 but the payment was recorded on February 2. Since it's now February 4 the payment has actually come in and the PM has the money in hand. But the statement engine was only looking at the statement date of January 31 so the booking was excluded. This caused quite a bit of irritation. To help with this, we've tweaked the statement logic to check the generation date when looking at payments and include any bookings with payments that occurred before the generation date instead of the statement date.
Another highly requested feature we added is a new PM report called Owner Statement Bookings Remittance that shows the booking detail from your statements across any date range. This allows you to look at (or export to Excel) all the details of your owner statements across any property, owner or date range, and you can use our standard reporting tools to group by owner, property or date. Think of this like opening individual owner statements and exporting the guts to Excel, but instead of opening them one by one, you can now use a report interface to query it all in one go.
Here's an example of where we queried several owners across several months and exported it to Excel. The highlighted cells show the difference between the owners, properties and statement dates with all the booking data to the right of that. This is an extremely important report because it gives you (the PM) the ability to see individual or multiple owners and properties together with all the booking data next to it. You can use this to provide End of Year reports to your owners or do in-depth analysis.
We noticed, while designing out the PM roadmap, that owner records needed more tracking fields, and then we noticed the same with contacts (ie. guests). The ultimate goal is for all major business objects in the system (bookings, inquiries, guests, quotes, properties, and so on) to have the same type of tags, notes, attachments and custom fields available through a common menu element. While we work towards that goal, we decided to go ahead and add a bunch of these things to owners and guests.
We added tags, notes and custom fields to owners, and we redesigned the owner pages to have tabs so that they can be viewed and managed separately. Navigating to an owner, now shows an overview of the owner's contact info, preferences, tags, notes and custom fields.
Notice at the top we also show where this owner is used throughout the system and what other features this owner is associated with such as a portal access login. This is similar to what we started doing with email templates and it's a pattern we like and are expanding to other features.
Clicking the top Change button takes you to the tabbed view where you can make changes.
All three of these things - tags, notes and custom fields - work the same way for owners as they do for properties, quotes or bookings. You can see tags on the grid of owners and filter by tag. You can define custom fields at the owner level and then fill different field values for each other. For instance, you may want to denote which owners get statements on certain days of the month or which owners you send a Christmas card to. You can use tags to denote those things. Suppose you need to email the owners' statements to special email addresses different than the normal one on file, or to multiple email addresses. You can do that by setting up a custom field for owners called "Statement Email Addresses" and then set what it should be on each owner and then use that custom field in your statement email template as the TO field.
We then did the same for contacts (ie. guests). Contacts already had tags, but we went ahead and added notes and custom fields to contacts as well. Like owners, the Note field on contact can take up to 10,000 characters and is shown in the list if a note exists. You can also filter for notes as well - did I mention that? So if you forgot which owner or contact you wrote a note on, try filtering the list for only those owners or contacts with notes.
Custom field on contacts work the same as everywhere else, so we won't waste time digging through that. Click into any contact and you'll figure it out from there.
While we were doing all this work on custom fields for owners and contacts, we realized that a bunch of system field codes would be better organized by moving them to the owner and contact level. For instance, instead of specifying the "booking guest email" as a field code, you should specify the "guest email" itself since every booking is already associated with a guest. We made numerous changes to field codes moving all the booking guest field codes to guest and all the statement field codes to owners. Take a look at our master support article about Field Codes to see the latest list. You'll notice new field code sections for Owner field codes and Contact field codes. "Contact" is now what we call guests. The field codes in those Owner and Contact sections aren't new. Most of them used to be in other sections and were moved to their own section. For instance, {ONAME} became {ONAME} and {CFIRST} became {CFIRST} and so on.
A couple points of clarity...
If you're wondering where certain field codes went, when looking at the "Insert Field" window, check the other tabs along the top. For instance, if you don't know why the Bookings list of field codes no longer show guest related fields, look in the Contacts tab. The Owner tab likewise.
If you're worried about your existing templates, and the field codes that you used in the past, don't be. We swapped out all the field codes in your existing templates, so they should continue working without a hitch.
We also spent some time on our search results page. You can now search notes on guests as well as on bookings and quotes, and the search page will show the guest and its contact info and notes above any associated bookings, quotes or payments.
Nothing was removed from the search page, just a bunch of cool new stuff was added!
The last new feature to mention (whew! 🤕) is that you can remove or disable owners from the PM area. Make a mistake in your data entry or no longer need to manage an owner's property? You can turn the owner off for good. Simply navigate to the Owner grid and select the owner(s) to disable, or drill into the owner and use the "Disable" button there. The owner and their associated history will still remain in the system but you won't be bothered by that owner's name in drop-down lists, reports and so on.
While moving PM stuff around, we cleaned up the PM menu. All the reports that used to show in the PM menu are still there, same as ever, but they no longer clutter up the sidebar menu. You get one "Reports" tab and that takes you to the real Reports menu where the PM reports are located.
Tags have been well-received by users because of their power and versatility, but we noticed that they were a little confusing on triggers. What does "everything but" mean when selecting tags or "only" for that matter? Does the booking need to only have the selected tags and no others, or are the tags the only ones examined? We changed tags on triggers into two separate lists labeled "Has Tags" and "Doesn't Have Tags".
This makes it much clearer what will happen when the trigger runs, and this allows you to target bookings with good and bad tags at the same time. For instance, you might want to send a post-departure marketing email to all bookings that have the tag "large group" but not if they also have the "bad guest" tag. You can now do that!
Last week, we mentioned that Airbnb Infants are now shown on bookings, only they were showing a little too much. They were showing up on Party Size and other areas, causing confusion. Is an infant a "guest" in the sense that it's a human being like everyone else? Well... not really because the guest count doesn't include Infants in Airbnb land. To reduce confusion, we stopped showing the infant count in party size or guest labels and only show Airbnb Infants on the booking itself if it's an Airbnb booking.
From the beginning of time, we've never sent "new inquiry" alerts if the inquiry comes from Airbnb via an API connection. This is because Airbnb already alerts you when someone sends a message. However, some users have shown us scenarios where getting the OwnerRez alert will be beneficial, so we now have an option in the Airbnb API settings to turn on the "new inquiry" alert if you want to get it.
The inquiry/booking widget has gotten smarter too. We now block selection of unavailable dates on the inquiry/booking widget to make it harder for guests to screw up when putting in their arrival and departure dates. Before, the unavailable dates were colored as unavailable but still select-able. We also changed the date selectors to stop navigating to previous months.. When it comes to dates you can't book, don't look and don't touch!
Another great enhancement is the new rate setting that lets you specify, globally, if your night rules should be based on arrival day or all the days of the booking. To find this, go to Settings > Rates and click the top Settings button.
You'll see a new Evaluate Rules field with those options. This matters because users often want to align their rates and rules with what channels (eg. Vrbo) do. OwnerRez is inherently a lot more flexible and versatile than the channels - our rate and rules options are ten times more powerful than anything the channels support. This sometimes creates problems because what guests see in one place will be different than somewhere else. if you want OwnerRez to continue evaluating rules based on all nights of the booking when the guest books direct, leave the option as "All Nights Of Stay". If you'd rather simplify your rules so that guests have the same experience everywhere, go ahead and choose the "Arrival Night Only".
In recent times, we've added the ability to view and edit cards on file, and we've continued expanding that feature. We've just released some updates to work with non-verified cards so that pending bookings can "try again" using a failed or unverified card without bothering the guest or needing a brand new card entered. Failed or unverified cards are still stored and still usable. Likewise, the system will now allow you to schedule a future payment or security hold using a failed or unverified card so that it can try the card and, if it still fails, email the guest again. Bottom line - we no longer assume a failed or unverified card can't be used for future things.
I answered it! Our new "Create And Send Quote" button is a big hit, but it wasn't actually marking the original inquiry as answered, so we fixed that. Now the button will quickly take you through creating the quote, sending it and answering the inquiry all in one step!
Renter agreement signing. We found an issue where renter agreements were being signed by the guest, and on-signed triggers were firing, but the PDF wasn't fully archived yet. The guest would get the trigger email, but the PDF link didn't exist yet, so part of the email was empty. All fixed now!
Card on file with booking created triggers. We fixed a timing issue where bookings would store cards on file but the on-create triggers would not run correctly.
Deleted tagged entities. A lot of things can be tagged nowadays, but what happens when something is tagged and then that same thing is deleted? The Tag Usage grid was crashing because it was still trying to find the tagged item. This has been fixed. And hey, if you don't know what the Tag Usage grid is, check it out over here. It shows all the items in the system that are associated with any set of tags, no matter what type of item it is. Pretty sweet.
Card editing redirect. We fixed an issue where cards on file were redirecting improperly and showing the wrong validation after being edited.
Missing Stripe fee. As of right now, Stripe is the only gateway that returns fee data to OwnerRez automatically with every transaction, and our Stripe users really like that. A recent update introduced a bug where multiple failed Stripe transactions would create a scenario where the next successful transaction was not returning fee data. This has been fixed.
Long phone numbers and QuickBooks. We fixed a bug where really big phone numbers were crashing when the booking synced across to QuickBooks. Evidently, Intuit has a problem with phone numbers that are typed as "I'm at (912) 555-1212 and my hubbie is 202-444-526 but use ext. 47" 😂
Unicode names and QuickBooks. Apparently, this is the week that QuickBooks wanted to get finicky. It also choked on names that have tildes and other unicode characters outside of the basic alphabetical one the western world is used to. Fixed!
Numbers should be numbers in Excel. Excel will show values as numbers even when those values are not stored as numbers, but it gets irritated and tells you to change them and it won't allow you to do number stuff like sum, count or average. We fixed this so that our export is outputting real Excel-approved numbers.
Slow reviews and thumbnails? Never! In case you've been living under a rock, we here at OwnerRez care a lot of about speed. We measure everything and are constantly improving our features and pages to be fast and efficient. We recently got a whiff of some slow reviews and property thumbnails and did a bunch of work to make them fast again.
HomeToGo is a channel too. Our Channel Rate Tester tool lets you pick an API channel to test rates for, but HomeToGo wasn't an option in the list of channels. We fixed that.
Optional surcharge seasons. In recent weeks, we changed our season calculations on surcharges to more-accurately reflect what surcharges or discounts should apply to a booking where it overlapped multiple season. Our optional surcharges (ie. the add-ons selected by guests during quote acceptance) got no such love unfortunately. We fixed them so that they follow the same season calculations.
SMS forever. We fixed an issue where an SMS message was triggering to multiple phone numbers but, because one of the numbers was failing, the entire loop was running again.
PM Lock blocking security holds. We noticed that bookings with PM Lock turned on were not allowing security holds to be scheduled or reserved. All better now!
This week, our latest videos are about payment processing. First, we released a high-level overview of what's available for payments in general, and then we added a video about credit card processing. We have upcoming videos, actively being worked on, that are about checks, PayPal, security holds and pending confirmation. When you get a second, take a look at the first two:
Good news, it's Friday!
If you don't already know, we're hosting a webinar this upcoming Tuesday 2/2 at 8:00 AM PST. We'll give a high-level demonstration of how OwnerRez looks across all of its menus and features, and have a Q&A section to answer any questions you have. The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez Demo webinar link to register.
In December, short-term rentals were allowed to operate again on Oahu Hawaii Island and Kauai. Maui County had over 250,800 available vacation rentals, making it the largest vacation rental supply out of all four Hawaiian counties. In December, they had a 41.9% occupancy rate with an average daily rate of $277. Meanwhile, hotels only had an occupancy rate of 23.8%. Shocker: travelers like vacation rentals more than hotels.
Jersey Shore is seeing high demand for vacation rentals in the wake of coronavirus. Not only are they seeing high demand, tourism highs in the fall have broken the previous year's records with a revenue increase of 6.5%. In Cape May County, 47% of homes are considered second or vacation homes, so lack of vacation rentals is not an issue. This increase in demand is being fueled by the flexibility associated with remote work and online schooling.
VRM Intel released a customer survey on how many people traveled in 2020 after March or - as its better known - the start of the craziness known as Covid-19. The survey showed that out of 1,860 participants, 21.5% had traveled somewhere. Of those people, 31.1% chose to stay in a vacation rental versus the 53.3% who stayed in hotels. When you compare age groups, the group that most often chose vacation rentals was the 25-34 age range at 39.4%. Travelers 65+ chose vacation rentals the least often at only 21.1%.
The 4th annual #BookDirect guest education day is February 3rd. This day is meant for vacation rental providers to promote the message that there are a lot of advantages to bypassing third-party channels and booking direct. OwnerRez supports the #BookDirect movement! If you don't know already, you can have your own direct booking hosted website through OwnerRez. We are continually working to add more features to our hosted websites and we have some exciting updates coming out very soon!
Happy Wednesday, everyone! We have 31 updates to talk about, most of which are enhancements and bug fixes like last week. Let's go through the details!
Just one new feature to mention this week - we opened up our SMS feature to Canadian users. If you're a Canadian user, you can now search for a Canadian phone number to claim and use in your OwnerRez account. This will give you a phone number that is local to your area and matches your geographical location and brand. It may also help your guests avoid long distance charges if they are local to your area. Are long distance charges still a thing? 🤔
To use a Canadian phone number, follow our SMS instructions but select Canada as your country and enter the Canadian area code you'd like to use. You can search on any range of numbers (or even alphabetical letters) and our carrier will return any available numbers that match.
To be clear, any user, whether Canadian or not, can register and claim any type of phone number they want regardless of their geographical or business location. For instance, an American user can claim and use a Canadian phone number and vice versa. The same is true for our South American, African, European and Asian customers. However, it is recommended that you use a phone number that aligns with your geographical or business location.
We recently announced our support for 3D Secure 2 ("3DS2") which allows our European users to successfully take credit card payments while following 3DS2 legal requirements. Over the past few weeks, as we've worked with European users, we've enhanced our Stripe Connect and 3DS2 support with a few more updates...
After moving to Stripe Connect, we noticed that Stripe security deposits (ie. holds) were not allowing users to capture funds if the Stripe transaction was captured a certain way, so we fixed that. We also updated the Request New Card guest form to allow the guest to choose a different card if the first choice failed and the OwnerRez user was using Stripe Connect.
Over on the channel side, we noticed that Vrbo might send 3DS2 information to us, with a new booking, even if the OwnerRez user doesn't have a Stripe Connect account that supports it, so we skip the 3DS2 process in that case.
Some of you may have gone through the process to connect your Stripe account to OwnerRez and then wondered why it didn't save. After coming back from Stripe, OwnerRez asks you to set some basic settings and then save. We changed this to save the Stripe connection right away and then ask for the settings after the fact. That way, if you click away, the Stripe connection is still saved.
We'll keep our eye on all the new 3DS2 stuff, but if you see something that seems off, let us know right away! Even if you're not a European merchant, keep an eye on your Stripe settings and processing history in OwnerRez and let us know if something seems off.
We're doing some research to help our website customers create much nicer custom pages in their OwnerRez hosted websites. This will allow you to select page layouts for many different styles as well as have mobile/tablet responsive layouts built-in by default. But until we get that out, we made a tweak that makes large images and long lines of text automatically adjust to mobile layouts automatically. This will help in the meantime until our custom pages have better options.
We notice a lot of little things each week that can be improved. For instance, this past week:
We noticed that you couldn't sort the Triggers grid by the Description or When columns, and some of you have a lot of triggers! We updated that so that sorting works on both the Description and When columns.
We noticed that inquiries from Vrbo were allowing you to send quotes back to Vrbo with the links stripped out. We changed this so that the double-blind proxy email address isn't stored on guests in OwnerRez but only on the Vrbo inquiry record itself, and then we changed the answer process for Vrbo inquiries to not allow normal email answers.
We noticed that PMs with hundreds of properties were getting really slow results when guests searched for availability across all of them. We figured out that this was caused by our system generating a to-the-penny amount total for each property it returned and it was returning all of the properties. We changed the availability widget for properties to return limited page sizes and then show a pager below the properties so the guest can move forward to the next set of results. This greatly increases speed while giving guests an smaller set of properties to scan before moving on.
We noticed that our hosted websites can have a home URL address but it would only go to a page with an actual URL of "home" if it existed. We changed this so that the "home" URL auto-redirects to the real home page.
We noticed that stored cards on file weren't showing as successful if the last transactions was a security hold. We updated our stored card logic to consider security holds as successful transactions (assuming the credit card is approved, of course).
We noticed that Airbnb sends an "infant" count that isn't part of the guest list and doesn't increase the number of children. The Infant number doesn't really change anything about the booking, but you might want to see it nonetheless. We updated the booking overview page to show the Airbnb Infant field if the bookings happens to have an infant count denoted.
To be clear, this only shows up on Airbnb bookings and only bookings where the guest has included an infant count. The Infant count does not increase the total guest size and will not show up in the Party Size information as well. There is currently no way of searching for bookings that have an Infants count.
If you use our PM system, at one time or another, you've probably had to turn off historical bookings that crept into owner statements the first time you ran statements. And you may have had to do this again. By "turn off" I mean you went to the booking, clicked the PM tab and set it to be "un-managed". This takes the booking out of the PM system so that commission and earnings are not calculated at all. The booking ceases to exist for PM purposes. However, there was never any way to do this in bulk. So if you had many months of bookings that had this problem, you had to radio our help desk to take care of it.
We've updated our Batch Update Bookings for Commission page to support "un-managing" bookings en masse. This works just like it used to only instead of turning bookings on, you can now turn them off as well.
Have you ever tried to select and set a lot of rates on the rate calendar at once? If so, you may have noticed that it would take a few seconds to finish. We updated our "spot rates" to work a lot faster. You can now set a couple of years worth of rates in less than 1 second. 🤯
Oh hey, if you use the Norton Safe Web community, OwnerRez has now been whitelisted as a safe app/website to use! No, never heard of it? We hadn't either, but evidently it exists and some of our users were getting bugged by a "THIS MAY BE UNSAFE!!" warning whenever they got our emails or logged into OwnerRez. We submitted all of our domain names to be whitelisted in the Norton Safe Web directory so our Norton users are all set now!
Booking activity language and formatting. Awhile back, we started calling "security deposits" security holds instead. The booking activity list - that thing that shows a chronological bullet list of financial activity - was still saying "security deposit" so we fixed it to match. We also made sure the date formatting was using the user's preferences.
WordPress Plugin in Allow All mode. There was an issue where the Personal Access Tokens for WordPress plugins would not work if the IP Restrictions list was set to Allow All. This might be the case, for instance, if you re-used the same token for multiple sites. We fixed this to work. However, we do recommend using a unique token for each application you want to connect.
Minimum night rule or gap night rule? We noticed that our Minimum Gap Night rule was kicking in when the Minimum Night rule was shorter, so we fixed this. The Minimum Gap Night override only takes over if it's shorter than the Minimum Night rule. Does it hurt your head to figure out what I just said? Yeah me too, but the engineers say it was a real bug and it's fixed now.
Multiple scheduled security holds. In certain situations, pending bookings were causing multiple security holds to be scheduled. For instance, you might have already scheduled one manually or the guest might have scheduled one using a guest form. Then, you go to Confirm the pending booking and the system schedules them again. We fixed all that so that the pending > confirm process is smarter and double checks what's already been scheduled.
Vrbo Quick Connect link. When connecting the Vrbo API integration, there's a newish "Quick Connect" process that certain users can qualify for. However, we noticed that the link for Quick Connect was showing when properties had no listing data (descriptions, amenities, photos). The user would go mash Quick Connect link and fireworks would happen. We now hide the Quick Connect link unless the property has listing data.
Quote listing site. When editing the quote Info page, changing the Listing Site back to blank (to remove it) and saving did not work. The original Listing Site information would still remain. This has been fixed.
Dutch widgets. Our friend Dennis from LayerFort noticed some translation issues with the Dutch words in our widgets. He graciously gave us the fixes and double checked some other Dutch translations. Thanks, Dennis!
Hey, we cover nadrual diasters ant deelays! We found and fixed a small typo in a blurb about Travel Insurance. It was pretty tiny, but hopefully no Grammar Nazis decided not to buy Travel Insurance because of it! 🤓
Default Property URL for multi-user widgets. Users that use our hosted website feature automatically get a default Property URL generated for each of their properties. They can override this by setting the Property URL to something else but, if that's removed, the system falls back to using the hosted website URL. However, some of those users were also listed on multi-user widgets which are widgets that allow multiple OwnerRez users to display their properties, across the different OwnerRez accounts, on the same single widget. When that happened, and the property had no Property URL, the default URL was not kicking in. This has been fixed.
Discount codes on Renter Agreement previews. When someone previews the Renter Agreement for their quote, the table of charges was not including any promo-code generated discounts. This is because the preview is dynamic and depends on a number of parameters that are passed to it on the fly. The promo code is now being included so that the charges are fully displaying any promo-code discounts that were selected by the guest right before they previewed the Renter Agreement.
PM Lock locks down Damage Protection. PM Lock is designed to protect PM users from accidentally manipulating bookings after they've already remitted the money to the owner. However, we noticed that Damage Protection could still be changed on bookings that had PM Lock turned on. This creates the potential of still changing the owner's balance depending on what happens with the Damage Protection. We updated PM Lock to not allow Damage Protection to be changed if PM Lock is turned on. In order to add Damage Protection manually, you now have to remove PM Lock first.
RemoteLock discount clarity. We fixed the RemoteLock discount message to refer specifically to their branded locks. RemoteLock does not honor the OwnerRez discount on the non-RemoteLock hardware in their online store, only on their own.
What third party? We were flagging the booking as having sent alerts to third parties when no third party alerts were configured in the first place. We now detect that the property has no third parties and don't set that the alerts were sent.
This week, our latest videos are about installing OwnerRez on Android and iOS devices and our integration with TouchStay. Enjoy!
On Tuesday 2/2, join us for a live demo of OwnerRez! This is a great opportunity for you to learn something new and ask questions you have during the Q&A section.
Glen Ruggiero, from our customer success department, will give a high-level demonstration of how OwnerRez looks across all of its menus and features.
The session is free to join, but you need to use the sign-up for OwnerRez Demo webinar link to register.
You can find all of our upcoming and past webinars on our Webinars page.
It’s finally Friday! This has been a pretty big week for news. The United States has a new president, created a new vaccine distribution plan, rejoined the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization. Whew - all in a day's week’s work. 😅
Now let’s talk about vacation rentals!
Vrbo caught some heat for not following the lead of Airbnb, which blocked and canceled all reservations in the Washington, D.C., area during inauguration week. Expedia, the parent company of Vrbo, stated they were carefully evaluating bookings and launching extraordinary emergency procedures. In the end, Vrbo decided to block any new bookings starting Tuesday, January 19th, through Friday.
In a Bloomberg report, over 1 billion hotel rooms sat empty in the United States alone during the 2020 holiday season. On the flipside, Airbnb occupancy rates soared during this time. According to the report, hotel owners have seen about $46 billion in lost revenue. If this is any indication, short-term rentals is the direction the market is heading in.
Minneapolis, Minnesota, is preparing to implement a new short-term rental ordinance that will limit STR ownership to only one property, other than their current residence. This is forcing owners to either sell their properties or convert them to long-term rentals. On top of this, no more than 10% of units can be STRs in buildings with more than 20 apartments. Why one vacation rental per person? Seems kind of arbitrary, right?!
For any of you based in Canada that use Stripe, you can now accept payments through the Discover Global Network. This will specifically cover over 889 million cardholders from Discover, Diners Club International, and other cards that are co-branded with Discover. Even better - you don’t have to do anything, this has already been enabled for all standard connected accounts!
A month ago, we released the WordPress Plugin Beta. Some of you have already gotten your hands on this, and we have received a lot of great feedback. Cuvee, a luxury PM (and OwnerRez user), got their hands on this and ran with it. They created a beautiful new website, and use the WordPress plugin for part of the functionality. We look forward to seeing all the amazing custom websites that our users will create and look forward to expanding our WordPress Plugin to support that creativity. We love the new website, Cuvee!
Hi Lisa,
We do not support Agoda in our channel manager system.
I am not seeing you listed in Agoda as a channel manager when selecting the drop down list?
