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We are please to announce a partnership with Stays Group. This allows OwnerRez users to integrate some of their property data with the network of vacation rental listing sites that Stays Group provides.
Stays Group was created by Fetch My Guest Inc, a provider of marketing automation services for independent vacation rental professionals. They offer multiple regional vacation rental marketplaces to helps traveler in North America find their next vacation. Stays Group is a non-profit network of Independent Vacation Rental Professionals, with the goal of pushing the #directbooking movement and reducing OTA dependencies.
Stays Group network members have been serving the vacation rental community for an average of 20 years. They put the traveler first, providing clean and well maintained properties and on-the-ground experts with local knowledge. Stays Group members understand the importance of having flexible cancellation policies and real time local information.
Vince Perez, CEO of Fetch My Guest and a Stays Group member, told us "Our members have taken a big step towards creating their own cooperative platform and distinguishing their vacation rental businesses as they lead the future of #bookdirect for the coming generations. For the past few years, many corporate-backed interests have interfered with the valued relationships we have nurtured with our guests and our local communities. I am proud to work alongside our membership as we continue to grow and find innovative ways to give the guest unfettered access to our respected brands."
Many OwnerRez homeowners and PMs share the same feelings and have the same goals!
Stays Group Regional Sites include:
Check out how to connect Stays Group with OwnerRez by following our support doc.
Thanks and anyone wanting to scuba dive visit www.utila.rentals and mention "Owner Rez" for your discount.
Happy Thursday! If you're one of our American customers, hopefully the post-election news cycle over the last 24 hours hasn't completely wrecked your mental state. 📺😟 If it has, sorry to hear it, but hey - cheer yourself up by reading some OwnerRez updates!
We've got some great updates to talk about (18 to be exact) so let's get started!
The rate table widget has plagued us (and you!) for a long time with the columns it shows and the amounts inside them. Over the last year, we've changed it numerous times to reflect different scenarios for different people. Part of the problem is that the vacation rental industry has moved away from static period pricing to dynamic nightly pricing with discounts. But many vacation rental owners still want to show a weekly or monthly rate, for information purposes, that reflect about what it would cost if someone chooses the right length of stay. For a long time, we went back and forth showing weekly or monthly columns based on inferring what you wanted to show from your settings. This never worked because too many users wanted too many different things regardless of their settings. To fix it once and for all, we added specific show/hide settings on the rate table widget that allow you to specifically set whether Nightly, Weekend, Weekly and Monthly columns will show and, if they do show, how the rates will be calculated.
If you liked how it worked before, you can continue using the "Show if rules allow" option, and the widget will check out your LOS discounts and minimum night rules to deduce if a period should be shown. If that doesn't work for you, use the "Show always" or "Hide" options instead.
Those of you that use SMS messaging - have your invoices been confusing? They were to us, so we updated them to add more information. Invoices now show SMS message counts for both inbound and outbound separately and changed the language around it to make extra usage fees be clearer. This should help you understand what's going on. If you're curious how SMS message is priced, check out our Costs & Fees article.
Our PM owner dashboard shows a great set of graphs that show the owner a real-time view on revenue and occupancy for their properties. However, we were basing the calculations on time that includes yesterday (ie. the day before whatever the current day is when you look at the dashboard) but not including the current day. We updated the owner dashboard to make sure numbers are including today up through midnight so that they are accurate as new bookings come in.
We also added more permission options to portal access so that you can allow your owners (or other third party users) to see:
These additions will give your portal users the ability to know more about the booking. Want other portal options? Let us know!
Earlier this year, we released custom Cancellation Policies that gives you flexible control over your policies and maps those policies to channels. But what about your own website? Your own OwnerRez-hosted website should show the same, so we added that. Websites now show the cancellation policy for that property on the property details page.
While we were working on cancellation policies, we also updated the automatic description to include "and then no refunds" at the end so that it's clear that the last period is non-refundable even though that is typically implied.
Speaking of clarifying language, we also updated our new door lock grace periods to make sure you understand that "exact" time means no grace period. Again, this was implied, but it's better to be clear.
A few weeks back, we added a great video about our Listing Quality Analyzer tool. If you haven't seen it yet, give it a look. As mentioned in the video, we are constantly adding new LQA checks or updating old ones to be better. This past week we added checks for for missing location types and possible related-location types. This is important in making sure your listings are pushed to Vrbo and Airbnb with the right location data, which is something guests look for. For instance, if your property has Oceanfront selected as the location type, we make sure you have Oceanview and Ocean selected as location amenities as well. Being thorough in your advertising matters, but again - make sure to run Listing Quality Analyzer so that you see what we recommend!
Sometimes, our filtering is too accurate because our engineering team is made up of nerds that try to be exact. 🤓 The spirit of the law matters more than the letter of the law. For instance, when you search for bookings that have "no security deposits", do you really want bookings that have no security deposit records of any kind (even ones that failed) or ones that don't have an active security deposit scheduled or pending? You probably want the latter. "None" in that context really means a booking with no money to get your hands on when the guest's dog eats the curtains. We noticed this and changed it. The security deposit filter will now return bookings with failed security deposits if "none" is selected and there's no other pending or scheduled one on file. If you notice other filters like this, let us know!
We try to include a lot of screenshots in our blog posts and support articles, and if you click on those screenshots, they always open a bigger version. Only, they opened the raw image in a new tab which stinks when you're trying to read along. We recently changed that and upgraded all of our pages to add a helpful image carousel that keeps the page in view but shows screenshots in a larger window when clicked on. Pro tip: you can use arrow keys to quickly scroll sideways between screenshots when the carousel is open, and the article underneath will automatically scroll the text up or down to wherever that screenshot is in the article.
Have you noticed anything new about the icon that shows in your web browser? We recently changed our favicon from a palm tree to a modern green "OR" that more accurately reflects our current design. Sorry, palm tree - it was time to go. The new green one may not last long either, but it's another step in a long list of steps we're taking to normalize our design. Hate it, like it? Tell us what you think.
Trigger template drop-down showing old templates. Just like it sounds! After disabling or deleting templates, some triggers would still show the inactive templates. We found and fixed this.
Testing disabled CC payment methods. When deleting or disabling a credit card payment method, the system was trying to test the payment method (by talking to the gateway) like it does when you make other changes. However, if you're disabling or deleting, you don't need it to test the connection, so we removed that.
Obsolete system messages. Earlier this year, we changed our system messages to have a single "booking changed" message instead of individual ones for property, date, time and so on. However, the old system message records were still in there and occasionally being referenced. We cleaned this up.
RTB email for Vrbo showing amount. The Request To Book mode for Vrbo bookings sometimes sends out emails when guest credit cards fail. But when it does, it was referencing the booking amount as originally sent by the channel. The booking amount might change in between the time booking was made and when the card was processed - based on conversations between the owner and guest - so we changed the email to not reference the original booking amount.
Font selection on hosted website. When selecting custom Google Fonts for your website (yeah, you can do that!) there was a validation bug that made it so that older websites would get stuck. We fixed this to add a default font placeholder instead.
Billing info on payment receipts. We recently released an update that lets you change credit cards stored on the booking. However, when doing this, it affected the card data being shown on payment receipts and emails. We fixed this to properly look at the historical data that was used at the time regardless of the current card data.
Bad PayPal link on payments setup page. When filling in, or modifying, the settings for your connected PayPal payment method, we were referencing some old support links. This is now fixed.
Thank you. Don't get me wrong, I love you guys, always speak of you highly, chatted with some of you personally and appreciate quick responses & support. I am indeed frustrated with some of the recent changes but understand that some are necessary for the API to work when connecting to big websites (which is not necessarily what I am looking for, as I've been debating it for a while in addition to just not having the time to implement some of it... which now I will be paying for regardless whether I do or not). I will take time to read in more details your post & reasons.
Warm regards,
Ella
I fixed the link in Ken's reply. You can also find it under the menus above at both:
Resources > Video
Help > Video
Or on the Support Center Home under Show All Videos.
Tarki said:
One thing though, I find it unfair and misleading when the only way of having multiple users in your system is to have premium Property Management module with a fee.That's actually being discussed internally and has before in the past. The idea is to split out portal access to a different feature (from PM) and call it Multi-User that allows portal access and some other things. I don't have any ETAs or promises on that, but it's highly requested on a regular basis and we understand how it stinks for non-PM users to need to pay for PM just to get multi-user access.
We're working on adding videos pretty aggressively. You can see the whole list of them here:
https://www.ownerrez.com/support/videos
What videos would you like to see?
The service is great, I wish you had more educational videos for beginners to learn how to use your platform
Bravo. Great explanation. I fully understand and support the need for the price increase. Just the level of support that I've received in the past warrants such a change. I've never used any product, at any price, with such a high level of support. And that's saying something, as I've worked in IT for 25 years.
Thank you for justifying your price increase with a detailed explanation. Hope you do great product enhancements with the extra money you'll charge.
One thing though, I find it unfair and misleading when the only way of having multiple users in your system is to have premium Property Management module with a fee.
We don't have any property managers but only our staff and the only way of opening OwnerRez to them is to pay for the Property Management module.
In addition, the access levels for users are extremely limited.
Good luck with everything.
Your tech support alone is worth the increase. Best PMS out there. I respect and admire your culture. Kudos to you.
Great company, people, software and customer service 2nd to none. I've been here since nearly the beginning and watched this grow and expand capabilities. I had a wish list of features when I came on board. This product has become so much more than I ever wished for. I tried other PMS that claimed to be superior than OR and 4 months later I was back on OR. You folks are awesome and I tell anyone that will listen that you're the best at an amazing price to boot.
I’m thrilled to hear you aren’t taking on investors. I love all your updates and am willing to pay more for the time it saves my entire team. Thanks for the detailed explanation. Here’s to many more years!
Thanks for all you do. I could not do this without you all, with over 40 properties, it would be awful without ownerrez, so I understand the price increase.
Beth
Hi Paul & Chris-
I am truly terrible with software. You took the time to onboard me a long time ago, and Ken is holding my hand through ICal, Channel Bridge, and (gulp) API integration. Your product is worth every nickel.
Alice
I have always thought that your price was beyond belief at the very low price point you were at currently. I haven’t fully taking a look at how your increase as well affect me directly but I can tell you that I am more than satisfied and recommend you every time I get a chance to people who are struggling to manage their vacation rental and to deal with companies like VRBO. The change to put all of my properties with you last October was the best decision of my life. I was with you for a couple of years before with just one property. The learning curve is steep but your concierge service Saved my life. I am grateful for the service you provide and I am happy to pay you for it. Good luck to you and I look forward to many years of a profitable relationship.
Worth it! Your responsiveness alone is worth it, but the platform is really fantastic.
Ella, thanks for your many years of being a great customer (I see your history and recognize you by name). I'm truly sorry that you're disappointed. I hope you had a chance to read the Why We Did This section above. I look forward to your email - please send when you can. ❤️️
Yes! It’s worth every dime even with an increase. Will continue to use it. Love every part of it!
Your product and service are far and above all the others.
I especially support your decision to remain independent and to not get taken over by some investors, angels, vulture capitalists, IPOs, etc.
Thank you!
I will write up more complete email for you guys when I get a chance and have more time. However, not only some of the changes that you've made recently such as forcing us to change to a different pricing model for our properties has proven to be very frustrating, and not user-friendly, not just for me but many other users that I have spoke with, you're now doubling the price. I'm very disappointed in these changes. I've been with you for many years, back when you were in your early beginnings and I'm sad to see the direction that this is heading and no one was grandfathered in to anything, including how things were working, not to mention the prices.
Ella
We appreciate all you do, and especially the thoughtful communication regarding the need to increase the rate to stay healthy and relevant.
We agree!
Your service is still well worth the fee, I am glad to pay it and keep your business structure the way it is.
Worth every penny. Thanks guys.
Hi everyone, Paul here from OwnerRez! As we reach the end of 2020, I wanted to reach out to everyone and explain some changes we're making to our pricing. Yes, that pricing - the monthly fee you pay to use our awesome software.
Some of you have already seen the updated pricing calculator or new Costs & Fees article. Others may be reading this because of an email blast I sent out earlier.
Please note that if you joined OwnerRez before November 2020, the new pricing you see on the website will not affect you for 5 more months. Until March 31 of 2021, pricing will stay the same as before for all pre-existing accounts. If you did just join OwnerRez right now (hey, welcome aboard!) the new pricing model will affect you immediately.
Here at OwnerRez, we believe deeply in providing a quality product that focuses on customer success. As part of that, we have created a "People First" culture, and we believe in having honest transparent conversations with our team (ie. those that work here) and our customers. In fact, as we fill out our new website with Feature and Why pages, we are highlighting our story, team and philosophy as a company, and we hope you take note of those pages as we flesh them out over the coming month.
There are a variety of things we've tweaked, but here's the main differences:
The price for nearly every user will increase. There are a couple of rare scenarios where the price might remain the same or decrease, but those are extremely rare and typically only affect single property homeowners with many premium features turned on.
Simply put - you should expect that your base service fee will increase, typically in the range of 15 - 30%, depending on your number of properties and the features you use.
You can find out the exact amount right now now by going to our pricing calculator and putting in your number of properties and selecting your premium features. Keep in mind that any discounts on your account would not be picked up by the pricing calculator, so your invoice might be less after discounts kick in. Same thing with Add-On's like Damage Protection or SMS usage - those items would not show on the pricing calculator. But you can compare your main service charges to a previous invoice from your billing history.
I know that there will be OwnerRez users who are frustrated by these price increases, and there's only so much I can say to assuage that anger, but I hope that you take a second to read and understand how we came to this decision and why it's necessary from our standpoint.
This is not a naked money grab, and this was not decided overnight. After carefully watching our costs and growth for about a year, we planned on announcing this back in April (to go into effect at the beginning of summer) but COVID forced us to wait.
There is never a good time to raise prices, but they do need to be raised. Here is a peek behind the curtain on our thought process...
Chris and I strongly believe that OwnerRez is better off in our hands than outside investors. As they grow and succeed, it's common for small businesses to approach (or be approached by) outside investors who want to invest. Whatever the investment is called - seed funding, capital call, angel investment - the outside investor gives the company money in exchange for ownership. The company gets the money they need to hire more employees, increase marketing, and become a more-mature company. The investor gets a seat at the table and a share of the profits and..... has a say in what the company does.
For years, we've watched as companies have grown and died around this model, or - worse yet - lost focus on their product and customers. This is not what we want for OwnerRez. As a People First company, we want our customers and team to be the sole focus of our attention, not the demands of outside investors and banks.
OwnerRez has been profitable and debt free for several years. As we grow - adding team members and corporate overhead - it's hard to maintain that without compromising quality in our product, pushing our team members beyond a healthy work/life balance or by trading ownership and control for outside investment. We aren't willing to do any of those things, so we realized that we need to increase our prices so that we can continue building a sustainable company, happy team and awesome product.
(Side note: If we did get outside investment, the same type of price increase would happen immediately - and much larger - because that's the first thing investors demand: higher profit margins. Outside investors focus entirely on ROI and profit margins, not the people who use (or are behind) the product.)
Given the state of the vacation rental industry, it doesn't make sense for a Channel Management feature to be an add-on with a separate price. We spent years beating down doors so that all users - both small homeowners and large PMs - can equally use our Channel Manager settings. We lobbied hard on behalf of small homeowners so that Vrbo would allow them to use their own credit card processing and were instrumental in piloting that program for Vrbo, which became a massive success.
All users, regardless of size, can now automatically distribute their listing content, rates, rules, availability on Airbnb, Vrbo and Booking.com, and the vast majority of OwnerRez users already do (or have told us they are planning to soon). Those users that don't use API integrations typically use our Channel Bridge tool to crawl and download data for their platform bookings. Channel Bridge is part of Channel Management so the cost to those users is the same.
You may not use every API integration or every channel, but Channel Management as a concept has become the default way of life for vacation rental homeowners and PMs. You rely on listing platforms to send you bookings, and you need your vacation rental software to manage that as a serious first-class part of the system in one way or another. And we've done exactly that - invested massive amounts of time into making Channel Management a fast, flexible experience that works really really well. As I write this, we are finishing up testing on new channel integrations that are coming soon, and we remain committed to partnering with others in 2021.
As we considered how much we needed to increase pricing, we realized at the same time that Channel Management should be included by default for everyone.
OwnerRez is more than just an app with features and settings. It's also about quality support. Our support - both what you read online and the responses you get from us directly - is a large part of what makes OwnerRez OwnerRez. We actively spend a good chunk of our engineering time on updating, changing and evolving our support - video libraries, accurate search functionality, careful messaging about updates. We've built systems under the covers that track our call logs, tickets and notes with you, and the problems you're facing, so that we can establish a rapport with users that lives across team members. Being People First means not giving in to "script robot" support systems or paying minimum-wage CSRs to copy/paste answers that you already found yourself.
Quality support has a cost and, as mentioned above, is not something we are willing to sacrifice as we grow. In fact, we're doubling down by adding more support and sales engineers so that our phone support can get better.
Our commitment to quality is also shown in how we monitor and update our system. Every week, we release dozens of updates (some of which are publicly documented) but many aren't documented because they involve infrastructure, networking or background work that would not make sense as a public update for users to read. As an engineer-led company, quality and attention to detail is in our DNA and the reason we want to maintain control of the OwnerRez path long into the future.
Quality and attention to detail has a cost. We know that most of you already pay more than the 20/month minimum, but we have many users that still hover around that price point. Even without Channel Management, that 20/month price point gives you tons of stuff - the world's best calendar import/export engine, widgets, triggers, messaging, CRM, reporting and much much more. But at 20/month.... quality is not sustainable. We are not willing to sacrifice quality, so the minimum has to go up.
One of the interesting things we noticed when analyzing our pricing was how we are, even after the price increases, still significantly cheaper than most of our competitors - many of whom have weaker products. Flashy designs notwithstanding, most of our competitors have clearly inferior products - the options are limited, the settings are buggy, updates take months to come out and support is nowhere to be found. We know this because we've tested their products ourselves and because we have a constant stream of new users telling us this, having left them behind. Why then, are those competitors charging 2-3 times as much as we are?
To be clear, we did not increase our prices to match competitors. That's not how we roll. But we feel strongly that OwnerRez is more than the "value product" in the industry and should not be selected because it's a bargain. These price increases allow us to comfortably take care of all the issues above while still being 25-30% less expensive than our competitors.
As we continue working on numerous partnerships, integrations, unified inbox, hosted website pages, PM overhauls, QuickBooks overhauls and other powerful updates, we will continue to outshine our competitors while leaving you satisfied that you're not over-paying and that your software is in the hands of a happy team that is focused on your success.
That's the position we want OwnerRez to be in.
As always, feel free to reach out and comment (here below the blog post) or send us an email with your thoughts. We will do our best to explain our viewpoint if something is unclear. Thanks for being an OwnerRez customer!
Unfortunately, I agree with Jason, also. Hard to do when you have weekly rates for a property. Is there a way to put something on that page that you can just enter a weekly rate, without calculations and discounts?
Thanks, Claudia
Happy Halloween everyone!👻
We'd like to start this week off by congratulating Wildbit on 20 years of business. If you don't know who Wildbit is, then maybe you know some of the products they've created. One of their most prominent products, which OwnerRez uses for it's email system, is Postmark. We love Postmark and have used it for a long time. If you've ever set up a "verified sender email address" in OwnerRez, that's the same Postmark that sends the yellow instructions with DNS instructions.
But beyond the Postmark product specifically, we love Wildbit as a company because of the culture they've created. For 20 years, they've maintained the perspective that companies should prioritize people first - not just "customer" people but also "employee" people. They started out as a small startup in Philadelphia and have grown to a team of more than 30 and over 100,000 customers.
Here at OwnerRez, we partner with many companies and use lots of products to power our software, but Wildbit stands out as a great example of what businesses should strive to be. So congrats on the 20 years, Wildbit!
In other not-so-fun news, we're getting reports that some OwnerRez users have had their Vrbo accounts compromised through successful phishing attacks. Hackers will send a targeted link that looks like it's a Vrbo booking request, which leads you to a Vrbo-looking website, which leads you to input your username and password, which allows them to record and use to access your real Vrbo account,
Needless to say, make sure that the links you click on from Vrbo are actually from Vrbo. Also, this is another great reason you should move to using the Vrbo API connection we offer. Having an API connection makes it much harder for hackers to do anything with your listings. Even if they successfully gain access to your Vrbo account, they can't change your listings, rates, availability and so on. All of that is driven from OwnerRez. In fact, even you yourself cannot change that stuff from the Vrbo dashboard because of how the API mode operates. So just a reminder here to stop using iCal and switch to API!
Airbnb is gearing up to list its shares on the Nasdaq. Earlier this month they aimed to raise $3 billion in IPO, giving Airbnb a valuation of over $30 billion! We heard about the plans to go public earlier this year, but now it's reported that Airbnb wants to do this before the end of the year. While COVID may have put a dent in the vacation rental industry earlier in the year, things are very much up for Airbnb which has recorded record booking days ever since. As of right now there is no official date when the IPO will take place, but we'll be sure to let you know.
Our CEO, Paul Waldschmidt, has been featured in PropTech magazine, a magazine devoted to real estate news, technology and software! He was interviewed a few weeks back, where he gave insight into OwnerRez's goals and how we try to achieve them. The article and profile will be included in an upcoming magazine issue, but you can read an advanced copy here.
Where can we find info about what you write under "As for the Host & Guest Reliability Standards, Airbnb has added new criteria in the following areas"? Meaning, is there anything we can adjust in regards to Unauthorized late checkouts, Unauthorized pets etc?
I'm with Jason, I don't like the change and think it's a step backwards. We are being forced to figure out discounts as oppose to a flat rate for a month or week. I spent days doing this, and now have a multitude of discounts, and none really works 100% as I would want it to, which was VERY simple to accomplish before
mixture of full time and 1099 contractors.
