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As Vrbo celebrates their 25th anniversary, we wanted to take a look back at their long history. Vrbo started the first online vacation rental service back in 1995 and were really the first ones to define what the “vacation rental industry” was. Until Airbnb came along, Vrbo completely dominated the vacation rental industry and set the tone for everyone. Even as competitors started to spring up, Vrbo continued to grow and now provides access to 2 million whole-home vacation rentals in 190 countries across the world.
OwnerRez is proud to be one of Vrbo’s few Preferred Partners. We fought hard for channels to work with us directly, and we fought hard for our smaller homeowners users to get access as well. We meet with Vrbo monthly to ensure OwnerRez is up to date with their latest features and to look for improvements on both sides. Our partnership with Vrbo is strong and we look forward to working with them for many years to come!
We thought it would be fun to take a look back at Vrbo’s humble beginnings and remind our older users about the Good Ole Days. If you’re new to the vacation rental industry, these old images should make you smile as well.
The following images are courtesy of Archive.org. Click on the below thumbnails to see a larger version.
We haven’t always agreed with every decision Vrbo has made over the years. In fact, we’ve held our breath and grimaced along with the rest of you at times. But it’s undeniable that Vrbo did a huge amount of work decades before many of us got started, and we respect the long path they forged. We respect and admire that, and we wish them luck as they celebrate this 25th anniversary.
Airbnb can shove it. They are more trouble (and bring more problematic guests) than they are worth. I wish it finally imploded and went back to renting unpermitted basements and attics and spare couches - that is what they are good at.
Good news, it’s a three day weekend!🌴
Vrbo is celebrating its 25th anniversary by giving out 25 stays for free at highly-rated vacation homes on their platform. They’re including houses, cabins, condos and wait for it...castles!🏰 “We wanted to recognize and show gratitude to our customers who have trusted Vrbo with their family vacations over the past 25 years. To celebrate this milestone, we are inviting families to look back through their old family photos to reminisce on their most precious memories together,” Lish Kennedy, Vrbo’s VP of Global Brand Marketing. If you’re feeling lucky, you can enter the contest by posting a family vacation photo with the hashtag #VrboTurns25 on either Facebook or Instagram. Each vacation will be worth 5k. So get posting!
Do you remember what Vrbo was like 25 years ago? No messaging, no platform transactions, no API integrations, no Expedia, not even HomeAway. For those of you that are new to vacation rentals, think of “Craiglist for vacation rentals”. Someone should put together a montage of all the Vrbo homepages over the years.
Airbnb has decided that all hosts must agree to their Enhanced Cleaning Protocol. This all starts in October and will be rolling out into 2021. The Enhanced Cleaning Protocol started as an opt-in measure back in June, but now Airbnb feels everyone needs to be squeaky clean (or at least claim to be).
So what does this mean for you?
If this all sounds like a lot, well it is...just in case you need to adjust your cleaning fee, check out our support doc on that.
Apparently the Airbnb board room has been hard at work. Starting December 7, 2020 Airbnb is shifting all software-connected hosts to a host-only fee structure called simplified pricing. We mentioned this about a month ago and speculated that it would be pushed to other markets soon. That didn’t take long.
Before you worry, this does not affect hosts with a majority of their listings in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Bahamas, Argentina, Taiwan and Uruguay. So most of you folks won’t be affected, but they’re clearly moving to a booking.com model. For those of you that do qualify, Airbnb will deduct a flat 15% host service fee from each payout and won’t charge a guest service fee. As always, you can adjust the Airbnb rate in the OwnerRez API settings to offset the host fee.😉
Airbnb has also banned one-night stays over Halloween weekend.🎃 Airbnb even went a step further and canceled any existing one-night stays for October 30 or October 31. Hosts with existing bookings that fall into that category would “still receive payment” according to Airbnb. This is all due to the problematic house parties that we posted about last week and a few weeks before that and earlier in the summer...
"maybe I should turn this on"
Do you have listings in Australia, New Zealand, South Korea or Thailand? It's currently only available in those markets and will be forced on everyone there.
However, they've announced that they're expanding this in the past few days, so we expect it to move to many other markets soon.
Keep us posted. I'm curious how this goes as some neighboring states (eg. VA) are rumored to be preparing the same.
At the moment, no on rounding up, but that's something we're looking into. Thanks for your feedback, Ella!
I am still thinking that something is not working re latest TN tax change. I removed TN and County sales and only left 3% lodging in place. The total tax amt seems to be overstated still on quotes. Have ticket opened already.
Hi Paul, can we round up discounts to the nearest dollar? For example when creating week long stay discounts using %? It would look cleaner and simpler.
Pandemic parties continue to abound! Parties at a San Diego downtown high-rise are stirring up trouble. Numerous complaints of loud parties at vacation rentals have been made to the San Diego Police Department. Compared to all of 2019, these parties nearly tripled in the first eight months of this year. As soon as the county began to relax its COVID-19 lockdown orders, disturbances skyrocketed. According to San Diego City Attorney Mara Elliott, vacation rentals are illegal in residential areas, but city officials are not currently enforcing it.
Which begs the question - how do you enforce party bans? Airbnb stopped all listings from accepting more than 16 people…. Which immediately blocked tens of thousands of lodges, wedding halls and multi-group venues from advertising on Airbnb. Epic fail. Besides, 3 or 4 people can book a property then message all their friends to show up after.
Proactive monitoring is one possible solution. Vrbo and NoiseAware have partnered to offer a modern noise monitoring option for homeowners. The goal is to provide a way to wirelessly monitor the decibel level inside vacation rentals. If noise levels reach past a certain threshold, homeowners and PMs can be notified and take action. So go ahead, mic up your rentals and tell your guests to pipe down.
Curious - how many of you already use NoiseAware or Minut? Leave a comment below or send us a message. We’ve considered integrating with them, and I’m curious how many readers already have these in place.
If you have been waiting to take a trip to paradise, the wait may soon be over. At long last, Hawaii officials have stated that they feel “confident the state is ready” to reopen the islands. After three possible reopenings that didn’t occur, the state is ready to reopen tourism on October 15th. Travelers can now avoid that 14 day quarantine by testing negative for COVID-19 within 72 hours of arrival. Hop off that 8-12 hour plane ride and proceed directly to swabbing!
To kick things off all County and State Beach Parks on Hawai‘i Island reopened at 7:00 a.m Thursday. If you plan on traveling straight to the beach just remember, all beachgoers must wear masks, social distance and gatherings can only be up to 10 people max. Maybe just keep your snorkel mask on the whole time you’re in Hawaii?
Who here likes to be nickeled and dimed? No one? Strange! Escambia County, FL has voted Thursday to tack on an extra penny to the current four cents on every dollar spent on hotel beds through the Tourist Development Tax. This tax change goes into effect April 1, 2021, but don’t worry - that extra penny will improve your quality of life! Another week, another government increasing lodging taxes. It would be interesting to see what tax types are increasing at the fastest rate - meal, gas, lodging, etc - over the last few years. Lodging tax has gotta be near the top of the list.
Hi Ella,
Yes, the fee/discount setting on the payment method will be removed but you can establish a discount that can be applied on certain quotes from the surcharges area.
For the LOS pricing, remember also that you can use Condensed View to make all rent lines to show in one line only so that the guest only sees one "rent" amount after weekly discounts.
I for one will miss the "Legacy" pricing. I don't see an option to have a set week or month rate anymore besides applying discounts, which is not what I want. I'd like to be able to set a flat rate for a full week (7 nights) not only a % which calculates to weird numbers.
I also had a rate for 3 nights weekend, and now again only can apply a discount, and numbers don't look as clean as when there was a flat rate.
Also enjoyed having a "custom payment method" for a discount. So this will now be removed as I understand?
It took all day to try to play with new rate set up, and I did not come close to the simple set up I already had. :(
As we begin the final quarter of 2020, we're gearing up for some great new features and updates in the new year. As part of that, we're retiring several old features that have grown long in the tooth. Out with the old, in with the new!
At the end of the year, we will no longer support Legacy Rates and all accounts will be upgraded to the new Seasonal Rates and Spot Rates.
We don't want this to take anyone by surprise, so we're posting about it three months early and we sent out personalized emails to everyone affected to call your attention to this now.
Ready to upgrade right now? You can do that by using our Rate Upgrade tool, and you can read about what the changes are (and what you'll lose from Legacy Rates) by reading our L̶e̶g̶a̶c̶y̶ ̶R̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶U̶p̶g̶r̶a̶d̶e̶ ̶s̶u̶p̶p̶o̶r̶t̶ ̶a̶r̶t̶i̶c̶l̶e̶.̶
You'll want to learn everything you can about the new rate system, and you can do that by watching these great videos:
As you'll see in these videos, we've been hard at work on all the new rate features, both to cover a lot of business cases but also to be fast and simple to use - even across a lot of properties. We think you'll like the new system once you get used to using it! Regardless, the Legacy Rates settings will be removed at the end of 2020, so please don't delay in learning the new rates and moving over.
Why not continue supporting Legacy Rates forever?
We announced the new seasonal rates editor more than 7 months ago, and have worked with many users to upgrade and streamline how seasonal rates work since then. There is a reason we switched to the new system and called the old system "Legacy" - we always intended for it to be removed. We wanted to give users a long period of time to experience and learn the new system before doing that.
There are a number of confusing aspects to how the Legacy Rates system works, and those aspects are baked in deeply. Because seasons and rates are not tightly coupled - and you can create different types of rates (week, month, weekend) for one or all seasons - it's easy for users to shoot themselves in the foot without realizing it. For instance, you can specify that "Summer Season" is not associated with property "Acme Cabin" but then create rates for Acme Cabin that are tied to Summer Season. The result is - your rates never appear, and this was common for users to run into. The rates look right, but the season and property wiring conflicts with each other, and it's hard to see and debug as a user. There were many other confusing aspects to Legacy Rates, and Legacy Rates do not easily sync to channel integrations. While OwnerRez has many powerful features that don't align with what channels do, the rates problem was hard to support.
Over the years, as we've grown and matured, we've recognized where features are making our lives harder and realized that removing those features entirely will make everyone's life easier.
If you're part of our Affiliate Program, thanks for spreading the word! We know that many people have signed up because of the passion of our affiliate group!
Effective October 1, the Affiliate Program is changing its rate structure to a tiered 5-year model. You can read about the new rate structure, along with the other program details, in the Affiliate Program support article.
Specifically, the rate is changing from 30% for life to a 5 year period that drops from 30% down to 10% over 5 years. After 5 years, no earnings will be paid out for the referred user.
Why did we change the rate?
This change has been needed - and discussed internally - many times over the past years. This change was not made lightly. In fact, we tabled the discussion several times instead of pushing forward. We originally planned to make this change more than 18 months ago.
To be frank, the previous earning rate (of 30% for life) is too expensive for us to maintain in terms of the cost to "buy" new users as we grow and expand. There is a marketing/sales cost to every user who signs up for OwnerRez. That cost is paid in many ways - online ads, sponsorships, sales calls, onboarding time, support time and affiliate payments - and is a normal metric that businesses have to evaluate to make sure they are investing in the right ways.
We did some analysis of industry norms for affiliate payments and no one (in any industry) comes close to offering 30% for life. Typically the normal rate is somewhere between 10 and 15% (maybe 20) but only for 2-3 years. While OwnerRez has never worried about what others do, we do have to evaluate and fix bad business decisions. We believe that a 5 year model, starting at 30%, is quite generous for affiliate sign-ups.
What about existing referrals?
I'm happy to say that we are grandfathering in existing referrals. The users that you've already referred will continue earning you money at a 30% rate for life. Again, thank you for your referrals!
While we do have to change policies from time to time and cannot always grandfather in existing users, we try to make sure that expectations we've set are carefully considered before making those changes. In this case, we were able to keep the existing referrals as they are.
What about new referrals?
Any new referrals - that is, users that sign up using your affiliate code from October 1 onward - will be paid out according to the new tiered rate structure that ends after 5 years. Your monthly payouts will include both your old and new referrals together.
You may have configured your credit card payment method (eg. Authorize.net, Stripe, Lynnbrook) to add an automatic processing fee (eg. 3%). That setting is going away soon. In fact, the setting has already been hidden for anyone that didn't have it turned on or for new payment methods being configured. The same is true of the discount side - for instance, a 3% discount on the check payment method.
At the end of the year, this setting will be removed from all accounts, even those that have it currently configured. Please take a second, to read our Charging Guests a Credit Card Fee article to see alternative ways of doing this.
Is there an automated way of having the fee assessed based on the payment method the guest selects?
Currently, no. However, the way we were implementing it before was problematic and did not fully work. For instance, no channel (eg. Vrbo) bookings would levy the processing fee since that's not something supported by any channel. Even on direct bookings, the guest could choose the cheaper check method and then use a credit card weeks later or on a second payment. The booking would lock the payment method rule causing further confusion down-stream.
The alternative method - using regular surcharges - will mean that all guests will see the processing fee so that it applies everywhere. If they want to avoid it, they can contact you and you can remove it on a quote for them when they pay by check. Not a perfect solution, but it's better for the time being.
In the future, will there be an automated fee based on guest selection?
There is a new method we have discussed building that will add a processing fee on to the booking based on the credit card payment made at the time the credit card is run. This method should be much more intuitive on all sides because it simply increments the payment at the time it's run and the guest understands that there's a fee added on. On the booking charges, a special Processing Fee will show below the taxes. To be clear, this has only been discussed, not developed or scheduled for engineering. We have no ETA on that yet, but we may release it in the future.
While we're talking about changes, we wanted to drop a quick note that our overall pricing will be changing in 2021 as well. This will affect both base rates and premium rates across the board.
All pricing will continue to be per-property, as it is now, but amounts per property will be changing. We have not yet finalized the changes, so I cannot share the exact amounts yet.
One thing I can share is that Channel Management will be included in the base rate and no longer be a premium add-on. Given the way OwnerRez has changed in recent years, and the doors we've opened for small homeowners, it no longer makes sense for Channel Management to be a premium side thing. It applies to everyone and is essential to vacation rental management in one way or another. Unless you are in a very rare business model, you will use one or more of our Channel Management-based features (eg. Channel Bridge), so it makes sense to just make this a base feature that everyone can use out of the box. However, because of the heavy cost of supporting Channel Management, this means that the base rate will also be increasing across the board.
We are happy to announce VRScheduler as one of our esteemed partners. This allows OwnerRez users to have completely automated scheduling with increased staff productivity and overall satisfaction. 
"With our OwnerRez integration already used by over a dozen shared customers, we can definitively say this is a solid bundle for property managers." says Jill Mason, Founder, VRScheduler "We are excited to further our partnership so that more vacation rental companies can take advantage of the efficiencies gained by using OwnerRez and VRScheduler together."
About VRScheduler
VRScheduler is the calm way to manage vacation rental staff and operations. Integrate VRScheduler with OwnerRez and never miss another clean, inspection or any other task, track all of your maintenance issues and save hours in scheduling and payroll. Increase revenue and create happier guests and owners with VRScheduler.
Here is a list of powerful features you'll have at your disposal:
The ability to grow your business without the chaos of scheduling has been shown to save 80% of time spent. Higher occupancy due to fast turnarounds means better reviews and increased revenue.
Get started with a one-on-one demo: https://www.vrscheduler.com/contact-demo
TGIF Everyone!😊
Effective starting January 20, 2021, Airbnb is updating their extenuating circumstances policy for what sounds like a positive change for hosts. The new policy will only cover the following events:
If you cancel a booking during one of these events, the cancellation policy that applies to the reservation will determine the amount the guest receives back.
And hey, if all this talk of cancellation policies gets you thinking you should update your own policy, feel free to head over to our Cancellation Policies Overview page.
For those of you who use Converge as your payment processor, you may have noticed some changes. Users will now see an updated interface the next time they login. Some of the other notable updates include Credit Card Surcharge, Product Catalog, Billing & Invoicing and EMV Sales. Processor APIs typically remain backward compatible, so you shouldn’t notice any differences on the OwnerRez side, but if you do, let us know.
Tennessee has made changes for tax collection. Anyone who books a stay in Tennessee will have to pay the 7% State Sales Tax along with the 1.50%-2.75% Local Sales Tax. Plus depending on the county your stay is in, you will have to pay different tax rates. Knoxville has the least amount of county tax with a 3% Hotel Occupancy Tax. Next comes Memphis has a Short Term Room Occupancy Tax at 3.5%, plus a $2 per bedroom per night Tourism Improvement District Assessment Tax. Hamilton County has a whopping 8% of additional tax if you stay for less than 29 nights. So if you’re planning a vacation to Tennessee, Knoxville might be your best bet.
As usual, it’s all about tax money, not safety or real estate values like county officials like to claim. If they can get everyone operating a short-term rental to pay taxes, and increase those taxes on a regular basis, governments are happy as clams.
Aspen City stopped a new regulation on owner licensing as long as multi-unit facilities were licensed by the facility manager, so that they could get their short-term taxes out and get everyone paying. Mayor Torre says “The city has been behind on this and we are trying to get back into the game and get caught up”. That’s behind on taxes, to be clear, not safety.
Sonoma is purging 400 inactive STR licenses to make way for new ones. Why? Well a few weeks ago, as we commented here, Sonoma set an artificial limit on STRs. They’ve now realized that a bunch of the grandfathered-in existing STR operators are inactive and weren’t paying taxes - can’t have that. Supervisor Shirlee says “It’s really important that tourism comes back”. Well… important that taxes come back, right Shirlee?
And then of course the fees. Why charge a hundred bucks for an STR license if you can charge twice that? Or increase it 3-4 times if you’re Clear Lake City.
We joke of course, but it’s funny to watch the naked tax grabs and the we’ve-gotta-protect-the-people explanations that are used to justify them.
Maybe it's a small thing to others, but I am SO HAPPY about the 11 pt font size option! THANK YOU!!
(And thanks for all you do.)
Happy Hump Day! If you noticed the radio silence last week, that was because we had several people out of town and were beavering away on some internal projects. Over the past two weeks, we released 23 updates, so let's go through them. No new features but lots of tweaks and bug fixes.
You may have noticed (briefly) that the guest conversation thread showed third party alerts - for instance, new booking reminders to housekeepers or owners. While those emails are relevant to the booking, they don't apply to the "conversation" that is had between you and the guest. So we removed those third party alerts from the guest conversation. You can still find all outbound email in the Communication History area.
In the guest conversation, we also changed the action links to open original emails and SMS messages in a new window. This is important for users who want to stay where they are while looking at the original message.
If you use our Property Search/Availability widget, you know that the widget returns properties that are available. However, sometimes properties are not available for other reasons other than pure date blocks. For instance, there might be a lead time or booking window problem with the dates that the traveler requested and some of the properties are not available for that reason. The widget now has a setting you can turn on that will remove properties from the search results where rules prevent the property from being booked.
As we continue to enhance our public website, and modernize the design, we have begun changing fonts, sizes and imagery across many pages to be larger, more readable and clearer on all devices. Continue watching for updates to our public website.
As part of that public website work, we are creating new Tour and Features pages which will be out shortly. For the time being, the old Tours menu has been removed as the content was too stale to be useful. Look for new Tour and Features landing pages soon!
If you use our FloridaRentals.com API integration, you might have noticed that the Listing column on the dashboard didn't link to your actual FloridaRentals.com listing. We updated that so the FloridaRentals.com listing is now clickable right from the dashboard.
Need small font? Our rich-text editors (for email, renter agreements, website content, etc) only allowed 12 pt and bigger, but 11 pt is frequently used, so we added that to all editors.
We tweaked our Tags grid (in the Tags area under Settings) to have more-readable columns.
You may notice some warnings that pop up in the Taxes settings area now when changing tax settings, primarily around Airbnb taxes. We are warning about tax multipliers, so look out for that if you run into one. You'll know it when you see it.
Likewise, we added better handling of permission errors for Vrbo API. Instead of crashing or showing cryptic error messages, we are detecting permission errors and providing readable warnings.
Switching trigger templates. When changing a trigger, and selecting a different template (email versus SMS or whatever) it was not clearing off the old template type. This is now fixed.
Rate widget header on small devices. On some devices, such as small phones, the rate widget header was not matching the size of the data, which we make smaller for the device. We updated the rate widget header to match the small-phone size.
Paragraphs on Owner Story. Did you write an entire biography in your property's listing content under the Owner Story field? If so, you probably were disappointed to see that it all ran together and line breaks didn't show. Well, now they do! Write on!
Triggers grid link to channel message. On the Triggers overview grid, we noticed that channel messages were not linking to the correct channel message template, so we fixed that.
SMS Number not available error. Occasionally, our VOIP provider will show phone numbers that actually aren't available because someone else just claimed them. There's a brief lag but if you're lucky enough to win the lottery you might run into it - and some OwnerRez users already have. We fixed this to more-gracefully show when a phone number was grabbed by someone else in between the time you see it and click to claim it.
Queued Airbnb messages. You might have noticed that some guest conversations show old already-sent Airbnb messages as "queued" and it never goes away. Those messages were already sent long ago; this was just a display bug. This is now fixed.
No FloridaRentals approximate option. We removed the Approximate Map Location settings on the API settings for FloridaRentals.com because FloridaRentals.com doesn't actually support that.
Quote RA preview guest info. When previewing the renter agreement on a quote, the guest info was off. It didn't affect the final renter agreement that was signed and archived, but it was confusing regardless. Not any longer!
Template preview drop-down being cut off. Just like it sounds - when previewing any kind of template (email, SMS, etc) the drop-down of bookings that was showing was getting cut off in the header of the window. This is fixed and back like it's supposed to be.
Hosted website menu error. In certain circumstances, hosted website menus could not be changed without running into errors, but this has been fixed.
Rate widget future date calculations. We changed how recurring seasons were calculating end dates when generating dates for the rates widget. It should now be more clear and correct.
SMS trigger time zones. As we continue supporting user time zones throughout the system, we are fixing places where the time zone is not being properly honored, either at the user or property level. We noticed a problem on SMS trigger dates and fixed it.
Empty colors on header lines. On hosted websites, setting an empty background color would cause errors with header lines, but that is now fixed.
As with ABB changes, this seems like an idea meant for PR, not for helping owners. Each local community has it's own idiosyncrasies. In my area, we, normally, get vanloads of foreign tourists who arrive late, depart early and often do a one night stay. It will be lousy if they don't allow this, but those guests can always book on ABB.
Oh, but then they cannot book on ABB if they have more than 16 guests, because, of course, you know, if a guest was going to have a party of 100 people, ABB limiting the number for which you can book to 16 is really going to stop them from booking ;)
Perhaps they will all start booking direct!
Scott J said:
I really don't get the banning of one-night stays. Maybe for large houses. But a large percentage of my business are one-night stays. And these are single individuals or couples who have various reasons for booking one night that have nothing to do with parties, which I don't allow anyway.
I really don't get the banning of one-night stays. Maybe for large houses. But a large percentage of my business are one-night stays. And these are single individuals or couples who have various reasons for booking one night that have nothing to do with parties, which I don't allow anyway.
Wow this week went by fast! Happy Friday!😃
Vrbo is following Airbnb’s lead in trying to discourage house parties. Vrbo has decided to ban one night rentals in Arizona for the next several months or more. Many of those who live near rentals have complained about large Covid parties with loud guests that disrupt the neighborhood. Vrbo commented saying, "Our focus will be on understanding and addressing potential issues during the reservation process and the stay, and having systems in place to identify bad actors after the fact to prevent future incidents." If you were planning on throwing a Covid party, it looks like you’ll be shelling out a bit more for two nights, at least till January.
The city of Toronto launched a new online registration system for short-term rental owners. This was established to help the city effectively administer the new rules that apply to homes which rent for a period of 28 consecutive days or less. Those currently renting homes, or plan to do so, must register by December 31st.
Booking.com is laying off 25%, roughly 4,000 employees. This is due to Covid-19’s impact on the global travel industry. This extreme step of reducing their global workforce has been shared by many other travel companies. Back in April, TripAdvisor cut their workforce by 25%, laying off 900 employees. Similarly Airbnb laid off 25% of it’s workforce, amounting to 1,900 employees out of the job. The World Travel and Tourism Council predicted 75 million job losses in the travel sector due to Covid. Our hearts go out to those affected by the pandemic. Also we’re hiring and would love to get someone displaced by Covid onboard the OwnerRez team.
In other Booking.com related news, they have introduced two new rate plans. The demand for longer stays has been prevalent during these Covid times. Due to this, Booking.com now allows weekly and monthly rate plans. In addition to these new plans, they have also launched a pilot program to enable guests to book stays longer than 30 nights during the same reservation.
I would be completely and utterly ambivalent about whether the host or the guest pays the fee IF Airbnb's website calculated the total all-inclusive cost when displaying the average nightly rate to guests on the search results screen.
Otherwise, if I mark my rates up 15% to cover the host fee, then I'm at a disadvantage on the search results screen when I show a $115/night rate against someone else who shows a $100/night rate, even though the total price after all taxes/fees is identical for our two units.
Interestingly, lately it seems the Airbnb guest service fee is hovering around 14.1% (it seems to vary, but I just tested it on several different dates on several properties and it's right at 14.1%--it's been lower in the past, more like 10.5%, IME), so Airbnb charging the host a flat 15% (which is really equivalent to a 12% guest fee, since 3% of the host fee already exists and goes towards CC processing), they're actually cutting their revenue slightly. On the plus side, that means if I mark my rates up 12%, I'll still come in lower than hosts who show regular rates plus a 14.1% guest fee...hmm...maybe I should turn this on!
Happy Friday everyone! We almost ran out of week before the Product Update was finished, but hey why not read some great updates as you head into the weekend! Also, we wanted everyone to get a chance to read about the ASTRHO launch (which we're sponsoring) so please read that if you haven't already.
Great little chunk of updates this week with Airbnb Triggers leading the way, so off we go.
The big new toy under the tree this week is Airbnb Triggers. Airbnb Triggers are exactly what they sound like - our trigger system can now send channel messages for Airbnb. Since Airbnb is the only channel messaging we currently support, that's what Airbnb Triggers do - send Airbnb messages. They work just like email and SMS triggers, but let's take a quick look anyway!
Go to Settings > Templates and notice the new tab "Airbnb" that is showing. Since OwnerRez only supports channel messaging for Airbnb (right now), the only channel templates that will work are for Airbnb.
When you go to create an Airbnb Template, it looks just like an SMS Template. You get the same plain text name and body fields with the ability to insert field codes. Airbnb does not allow rich text, with styling, so the plain text format is all you can use at the moment.
After naming and saving your new Airbnb Template, you're ready to use it! Head on over to triggers and create a trigger and select your new Airbnb Template as the one to send.
As with SMS Templates, your Airbnb Template will show in the same "Send Template" list with all the others.
That's it! Couldn't be easier!
Remember that Airbnb Triggers & Templates can only be sent for Airbnb bookings. This may seem obvious, but you may need to copy different types of templates and tweak your messaging so that what you send makes sense for where the guest will read it. Are you sending the same message via email, SMS and Airbnb - all 3? That might irritate the guest. You might want to exclude Airbnb bookings on your regular email templates and then create special Airbnb Triggers for those bookings instead so the guest isn't getting blasted from both sides.
Another big thing we released was a streamlined design, with added features, for the guest conversation thread. Go to the inbox or open any guest. As soon as you take a look, you'll notice a bunch of changes.
For starters, your outbound email is now showing in the guest conversation thread. This includes everything linked to this guest - inquiries, quotes, trigger emails, ad hoc emails - and from historical email too. In the future, we plan on adding the ability to send email from here as well as receive inbound email, so this is a first step towards the holy grail of unified messaging across all email, SMS and channel messages.
By default, the automated emails (triggers, scheduled emails, etc) are collapsed and show as a thin gray timeline event with a summary. We did this so that the conversation is not cluttered up with lots and lots of redundant automated stuff, and the ad hoc messages stand out. If you click on these thin gray events, the original email will load in.
You'll notice that inquiries, quotes and bookings also show, but they too are collapsed into a thin timeline event with a helpful summary. Again, this is to shrink down the stuff that doesn't matter as much so you can see the ad hoc messages going back and forth. If you hover over the booking, a pop-over card will appear to show more booking details, and there's an action link (far right) that takes you to that quote or booking directly.
The last new feature for this week is manual door lock codes. You can now connect a door lock "type" that is manual and assign codes directly on each booking. For a long time, we have wanted to support several manual or scheduled ways of generating your own lock code - where you don't have an automated door lock - and this is the first iteration towards that goal.
Right now, it's simple. You go to Settings > Door Locks and connect the "manual" door lock type.
After you save, you'll define a set of doors and properties - call the door name whatever you want like "Front Door". You can have multiple doors if you want, so Front Door and Back Door can each have a code, and you can define multiple properties that these doors apply to.
After you're done setting doors and properties, the bookings for those properties will show the Door Code field and let you set the codes right on the booking. This is the same Door Code that appears if you have automated door locks.
Note that it is only possible to set manual door lock codes manually. It will not automatically be set from the guest's phone number or any other booking field. We plan to add code generation rules in the future, but right now it's purely manual end to end.
So where you can use this manual door code? In all the same places you would use an automated door code. For instance, if you use triggers to send an email template to the guest, you could embed the {BDOORCODE} field code in your template which would render your manual door code. If you were using a custom field definition to do this before, you can stop using those as these new manual door locks are a built-in replacement for that.
When registering new phone numbers for SMS Messaging, we had a button that said "Buy" next to each number even though you're not really buying the number then and there - billing is done later on the normal monthly invoice. Every time we emailed users joining the SMS feature, we would have to explain that "Buy" really means you're just claiming that number. We eventually wised up and just changed the SMS Phone Number button to say "Claim" instead.
As you click around the www side of OwnerRez, you'll notice that things are improving. At long last, the blog, support center, forums and other areas are improving - not just in content but in design. We are working hard to modernize the www side and, as part of that, work on accessibility and readability. To that end, we have increased page sizes and fonts to be easier to read on both mobile and desktop displays.
We noticed that our new SMS pricing was a bit misleading because it only mentioned the flat $15 charge for the number but not usage. We have clarified that so that SMS usage pricing is also mentioned. If you're curious, the usage is priced at 3 cents ($0.03) per outbound message after the first 200. The first 200 outbound messages are free, and all inbound messages are always free no matter how many you receive.
Ever notice that sometimes when you click on a guest, it goes to the guest's "Related Activity" page and other times to the guest's conversation thread? This was based on whether the guest had an Airbnb thread or not. But we changed that so now when clicking on any guest, you'll be taken to the guest's conversation thread.
Bad link to account time zone. In all the new time zone stuff released last week, we had some links in the app pointing to the wrong page for changing the global time zone, but those are now fixed.
Backwards Airbnb/SMS selector. In the guest conversation, depending on what type of messages was most recent, the top selector for new Airbnb versus new SMS message was backwards. Selecting one type would trigger the other. This has been fixed.
Field code insertion and last cursor location. In templates, some page inputs were inserting fields codes in the wrong spot or at the end of the input regardless of where the cursor (the little blinking thing that shows where you're typing) is located. We fixed this so that the page always remember where the cursor is when the field code editor is used.
Trigger run date and property time zones. In some cases, the trigger run date was evaluating the time in the wrong time zone. Properties can have their own time zones, different from the account time zone, so we made sure all triggers were checking all times in the correct time zone relative to the property.
We're excited to finally be able to tell everyone about a great new association that is launching today - the Association for Short-Term Rental Homeowners (ASTRHO.org). We not only support ASTRHO, but OwnerRez is also a featured sponsor!
ASTRHO was created so that short-term and vacation rental homeowners can easily access education, community, experts, perks and benefits; and quickly solve problems and be more profitable.
The professional Property Management world has had a number of industry associations going back several decades, but vacation rental homeowners have never had a strong voice in their corner. Now they do!
ASTRHO launched today and they have some exciting events coming up:
We hope all OwnerRez users take a minute to click on over to ASTRHO and join today. Take advantage of the free 14-day trial period and experience a new community of voices completely focused on your needs.
After joining, please spread the word! Wherever you do social media, please tell your vacation rental friends and partners about ASTRHO. Let's get the world out to all vacation rental homeowners today!
If you're sharing the word with other OwnerRez users, just share this blog post directly. If you're looking for social media links direct to ASTRHO, here's a quick list:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/astrho
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theastrho
Instagram: @theastrho
Happy Labor Day Weekend! We just pushed out a number of highly requested updates Wednesday, so be sure to read the Product Update.
Is Airbnb moving in the direction of a host-only fee (ie. no guest fee)? Looks like it. We got a small piece of news this week that, starting November 1st, API-connected hosts with listings in Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Thailand will be converted to use “simplified pricing” which basically means that the guest fee is dropped and the host pays more (15% to be exact). If you’re a host that already uses the simplified pricing, then you will have a 14% service fee until January 1st. After that, the service fee will increase to 15%. But again - only for listings in those countries, not everywhere.
Is this good or bad for hosts? Obviously, 15% is a lot more than you’re paying now, but that means you can increase your prices and the guest only sees your rate, not an additional platform service fee when booking.
For that matter, is this better or worse for guests? No service fee, sure, but hosts are going to jack their rates to cover it, so who knows.
The real question is - why is Airbnb doing this? To slow the #BookDirect movement? 🤔
In more Airbnb news, Airbnb is sharing data with the city of Los Angeles to find and remove listings that aren’t legal. Recently an estimate by the LA government showed that nearly 6,000 listings on Airbnb were out of compliance. Officials say when they tested the tool last week, it helped eliminate 1,350 listings for noncompliance.
Get ready - it’s only a matter of time before Airbnb has a data-sharing dashboard that any local town or county can use to check who is listed against their own records. If you’re not running a legal STR, your time is running out.
A couple weeks ago we talked about how Airbnb will begin cracking down on house parties. Now we see the results of that with Airbnb suspending 17 San Diego listings for house party violations. This crack down all started earlier this month, when a guest held an unauthorized party at a Sacramento County home. This ended up with three people being shot and injured at the party. Good to see that Airbnb is sticking to their word.
TGIW. (Thank God It's Wednesday??) Of course! Wednesday is when you read about all the new OwnerRez updates! 🐫
We released 18 updates this past week including a couple of great new features, so let's dig into the details.
If you've ever tried to move a booking to a different property in OwnerRez, you probably ended up a bit frustrated! Particularly if you had to also change dates at the same time. The system would check availability for the current dates or property when trying to change either which often required moving bookings to different dates in the future, changing properties and then changing dates back. And if you changed the property, dates or check-in time, each action would send the guest a different unique email about the change.
To streamline all this, we overhauled all of these things into a single Move Booking screen. If you need to move the booking at all - no matter if the move is property, date or time related - you now do that from the Move link in the yellow bar on the booking. The old Dates tab is gone forever.
The Move Booking screen is mobile friendly and lets you select property, dates and check-in/out times all together.
You can change all of these things at once, or just make a small tweak to one thing. If you change the property, the Arrival/Departure date pickers will smartly show you the availability for the new property as you work. No need to click back and forth or keep another tab open. If you happen to use our PM feature, changing the property will also show you if the owner is about to change and who the new owner is.
What about the email notifications to the guest? We changed those too! There is now one "Send Changes to Guest" system message that goes out for all of these (property, date, check-in/out time) changes. The system message will show the previous property or date with a strike-through line and the new one.
As with all system messages, you can create your own template to change the layout and style of this message.
The last thing I'll mention on this is booking reactivation. Previously, when you tried to reactivate a cancelled booking, if the property was already re-booked for part of those dates, the cancelled booking could not be reactivated. Now, we have combined this Move Booking logic into the same reactivation workflow. When reactivating, you can now select the property and dates you need while reactivating so the booking can shift dates or location when it goes back to active status.
Let's move on to time zones, shall we? Believe it or not, your OwnerRez profile always had a time zone setting - you just didn't know about it because it was hidden. We changed that so you can now set the global time zone for your account. This is above and beyond the property level time zone, so your global account can have a time zone and individual properties can have a different time zone. A property without a set time zone will automatically use the global account time zone. To set the global time zone, go to Settings > Culture and you'll see a time zone option.
While we were at it, we added a batch update page where you can see and set time zones and check-in/out times for all your properties in one place. Look under Settings > Rules > Check-In/Check-Out.
You'll notice some handy selectors at the top that you let you set all the properties on the page to the same thing quickly. Pretty sweet!
We went ahead and updated iCal events (ie. bookings and blocks) to include the right time zone relative to the property. This should help your phone or calendar system with start and end dates.
One last thing - sending trigger at specific hours of the day. Historically, this has been one of the most-requested things about messaging: the ability to define what hour of the day a trigger fires. Previously, our triggers always fired at the same time of day (around 3am eastern) no matter where in the world the OwnerRez user lives. This means your triggers might be sending out messages at strange times (or even in the evening hours on the day before).
Now that time zones are in place, we went ahead and updated our triggers to have hours! You'll now notice that every time-based trigger has a little "at [x] hour" selector right next to it.
This works exactly as it looks. The trigger will wait to send the message until the specific hour you selected on the day the trigger is scheduled to run. Remember that the hour depends on your time zone! If your time zone is incorrect, the message will be sent at the hour specified in the incorrect time zone, so make sure to go correct your time zones!
And yep - the hour setting works on SMS triggers too. No longer do you have to worry about your guests getting text messages in the middle of the night!
Awhile back, we added the ability for you to define a custom order for your properties both internally (on ribbons or reports) and externally (on things like widgets and websites). However, we noticed that several booking views - month, year and current - were not following that custom order, so we updated those booking views to follow the same property order.
Out with the old, in with the new! From time to time, we notice features that aren't working well (or cause a lot of confusion) and decide that it's better to remove them entirely then continue supporting the concept. We recently have yanked two feature that are now deprecated:
The CC processing fee feature is now deprecated and will soon be removed. Some people refer to this as "credit card surcharging". Basically, it when you set a fee (eg. 3%) to be charged if guests pay by credit card. If you currently have it turned on, you might still see it. Anyone who doesn't currently use it will not be able to turn it on. And it will be removed from everyone in the near future.
There are several reasons we removed credit card processing fees, but the biggest reason is because the way we currently levy the processing fee simply doesn't work. Guests can pay by credit card, causing the fee to hit, and then want to send a check later (for their second payment) and then want part of the processing fee back. Or vice versa - they pay by check for no fee, and then later use the CC form to make their second payment and there's no fee added.
What if they book by channel? Channels enforce price consistency - the rate displayed is the rate the user has to bill. How do we alert the guest that an extra CC processing fee may be coming when Vrbo has no place to show it during the booking process?
So the bottom line for us is that the CC processing fee is highly inconsistent and often incorrectly assessed and is a constant source of support tickets. Those that want a CC processing fee should use surcharges to create an automatic surcharge for (say) 3% and set it to not be taxed so that it's at the bottom and assessed on the total. Then if someone wants to pay by check, you would prepare a quote and remove that line item for them
The CSV import for Airbnb/Vrbo transactions is now deprecated and has been removed. Very few, if any, users use the CSV import for Airbnb or Vrbo. The ones that do use it constantly run into problems because the CSV data that Airbnb and Vrbo provide is inconsistent and non-useful. We have to explain why the CSV data doesn't work and point them at Channel Bridge or an API integration. So we finally wised up and yanked it entirely. If you relied on CSV data, apologies, but there are better ways of getting your channel data into OwnerRez.
Wondering where the latest change log is in the support area? We added an Updates link in the help menu, right inside the app, that takes you to the latest change log update.
No need to click around through a hundred support articles to find it. One click and you're there!
Health & Safety notes disappearing. This was a really nasty little guy. If you had notes (eg. comments) next to Health & Safety fields, on your property listing content, and then changed and saved something on the Rooms & Accommodations page, the notes on the Health & Safety fields would empty out. Wha--? Yep, but hey now it's fixed!
Cancel historical obstructions on Channel Bridge. When importing Channel Bridge data, we noticed that historical obstructions - ie. bookings or blocks from dates in the past that conflict with imported bookings in the Channel Bridge file - were often empty. Instead of showing those conflicts, we just cancelled the historical bookings and imported the latest from Channel Bridge. After all, if the historical booking or block is empty, what's the harm in getting rid of it?
Icons for social networks. If you select a predefined social network in your Hosted Website header, the icon name was filling in as "facebook" or "twitter", but those didn't actually work! The FontAwesome icons for social networks use a slightly different name, so we fixed them in our editor.
Property menu scrolling on Hosted Websites. Hosted Websites had some header changes recently and in the process we screwed up the Properties menu. That's the menu that shows all your properties in a drop-down. It was freezing and not scrolling on Chrome. This is now fixed.
Emoji in SMS messages. Everyone uses emoji, right? God knows I do. 😀 Only you couldn't send emoji if you were sending SMS messages from within OwnerRez. 😢 We found a bug that was preventing that and fixed it. Enjoy all your ☕️🌞🙏🎉🤓🤑👍🏋 things!
Little bitty feature request: one of my owners wants to see not just arrival/departure but also *nights.* I was really hoping this update would address her request. I know it's possible to calculate nights from the arrival/departure dates, but I'd like to make life easy for her. :)
FWIW, what would be very cool is allowing using data from the various reports. Including things like ADR, overall occupancy %, etc. in the owner report would be useful.
It’s Finally Friday! 🍻
In Wellington, Florida, a new ordinance limits vacation rentals to two people per bedroom (not counting toddlers). Also, one vehicle is allowed per bedroom, four vehicles maximum not including vehicles in garages. If the vacation rental has more than four bedrooms and sits on an acre or more of land, the guest is allowed an additional vehicle for each bedroom greater than four. Any vehicles parked outside must be in the driveway, parking apron or other designated parking area.
Well, ok then! Maybe this is a reaction to all the “house party” stuff in the news recently?
How badly impacted is Hawaii’s tourism industry these days? The Hawaii Tourism Authority released data on Tuesday that showed vacation rentals across the state were only at 14% occupancy during July. Looking back to 2019, vacation rentals were 78% occupied. The report takes data from 16,214 units and 28,372 bedrooms. Maui County took the largest hit with a reported occupancy at just 9%. Wow.
No more single night bookings in Chicago. In an effort to crack down on “house parties”, Mayor Lightfoot has implemented stricter rules for vacation rentals. A new ordinance, banning one night bookings, would like to make the decision permanent, although the commissioner of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection and the police superintendent could decide to revert back and allow one night rentals, without needing City Council approval.
This smells less like a house-party reaction and more like hotel lobbying by Chicago hotels.
Carlsbad, California has decided to raise taxes for short-term rentals. The city council approved an increase in its tax rate from $1 per night to 2% of the gross room rentals, which will go into effect November 1st. There are around 270 short-term rentals in the city, and as you can imagine they aren’t happy. So far five protest letters from vacation rental owners were submitted to the council.
By the way, that’s a massive increase percentage-wise. A weekend rental for $500 just went from $2 in tax to $10 (a 5 fold increase)! Granted, two bucks is pretty small to begin with.
Happy Hump Day, everyone! We took last Wednesday off, so this one is a doozy. Strap in, and let's get started.
Our property manager users have asked for many things since the PM feature was added, and we've diligently listened and noted those things down. Some of those items have waited a long time, and we're happy to announce that one often-requested feature is finally out. You can now create custom views, with custom columns, for your owner statements.
Previously, you had to use one of three hard-coded views for owner statements - full amount, owner revenue or owner amount view. These three views were based on what we felt most PMs wanted to show to owners, depending on their agreement with the owner. However, they were far from adequate. You might want to remove some of the columns that showed, add others, change how they were ordered or re-label the column header to have a different title or help text. You can now do all that.
Go to the PM menu and you'll see a new Statement Views section. Click create to get started and the rest is intuitive.
After selecting the columns you want to see, and the title for each, save and you've just created a custom view.
So then, how does one use these handy dandy new views? Answer: everywhere you selected views before! For instance, when previewing or creating a new owner statement, the Preferred View drop-down field will show your custom view along with the system ones. Select your new view and off you go. If you want an owner to always select that view, edit the owner record and set your custom view as the Preferred View for that owner.
We also changed owner statements to allow editing the view after it's created. This allows you to go back and switch the view for old owner statements when you come up with a new design.
The owner statement was tweaked to allow temporarily-showing full amounts and some other things as well. Give it a look!
While we were in there working on PM stuff, we also added the ability to set commission to quarter percents. For instance, now you can set commission to be 20.25% instead of 20 or 20.5%, and you can do this everywhere commission is set - on the owner, property, booking, even the charge line item.
If you're an affiliate who sends us new users (thanks for that by the way!) you may want to take a look at our new join page, or you can see it on the registration support article. We now require a credit card when signing up for OwnerRez. Everyone is given a 14 day trial just like before, and the card charge is not billed upfront. However you cannot sign up for an account without entering a verified credit card. There were a number of reasons surrounding this - mostly to limit fraud - and it's something we've been planning to do for a long time. We finally pulled the trigger.
We overhauled the search page on the www side to give you better, clearer results as well as show a search option in the top menu. We also added a search bar to the forums area. The forums will be overhauled in the near future, as well as other www pages, but we added the search bar for now to get you by.
We're super excited to mention a secret project we've been working on - plugin/API integration for WordPress websites. This is a big undertaking and a ways off from release still, but I wanted to drop a note about it because we're now working with a PM who is piloting the integration for us. Note that the WordPress plugin will be part of our Hosted Website premium. If you want access to it, let us know, but please be aware that we are a ways off and only working with one user at the moment.
And while we're mentioning secret-projects-that-are-being-worked-on-but-not-out yet, here are a couple of new API channel integrations we're in the middle of working on:
Our favorite vacation rental insurance people put out a new updated Damage Protection brochure, so we updated our support material to show that new Damage Protection brochure.
There is a system message for booking cancellations, but sometimes the guest doesn't need to know if it's cancelled or they aren't know through other methods. An example of this is Airbnb. Airbnb handles cancellations and will notify the guest, so there's no reason for OwnerRez to bombard the guest with additional emails. We changed the booking cancellation email to not email the guest for Airbnb bookings.
We updated our availability search logic to factor in required gaps. This is important because if a guest is searching for available dates, they used to see properties that had open dates but could not actually be booked due to required gaps. The new logic will remove those properties from the search results if the required gap makes it so the property is not bookable.
On Vrbo API bookings, the message that appeared when trying to recalculate charges was confusing, so we updated it. And we removed the option to recalculate charges entirely from the info tab of the booking if it's a channel booking - Vrbo or otherwise.
Those (very few) of you that are using SMS Messaging, the billing area is now updated to show the correct charges. Not a big change, but showing SMS related charges is necessary now that the SMS stuff is rolling out. There will be a lot of changes coming to this area - both SMS and billing - in the near future.
As we transition to a more guest-centric design, we are continuing to move pages and links around to better accommodate what we had before and the transition to the future design. As part of this, we added a guest "Communication" link to the booking, quote and inquiry overview pages which drill into the guest conversation. The email history links are back as well, though they now go to "Communication History" at the tab requested.
Long URLs when selecting properties and listing sites. This was most notably seen on reports, but there were other pages affected as well. If you select enough properties and listing sites, the URL would get massive and the page would crash. Crashes suck, so we fixed it.
Copy spot rates. If you had no spot rates (ie. calendar rates) and tried using the Bulk Copy Rates page, it would crash. All fixed!
Occupancy report percentages. When lapping across years, the occupancy percentages were off. This is now fixed.
Hosted site header stuff. When editing a header and no pages existed, there was a crash message - now fixed. Also in headers, the layout was wonky when you have too many links that overlap. We cleaned that up as well.
Owner Statement printing with Safari. Every try to print an owner statement from a Safari browser? Neither had we. A user recently tried and noticed a strange sidebar area showing in the print output. This is now fixed. Now that you know this, you can go back to using Chrome and Firefox, like 99.99% of the planet, completely unaware that anything was ever broken to begin with.
Long template names in System Messages. On the System Messages page, long template names would make the page layout crunch up on the left side. We fixed this.
Culture selector for uncommon currencies. There are many types of currency in the world, particularly if you throw in language/culture variations. Some individual countries have a dozen variations. Our culture selector had a hard time with it too, but it's all better now.
All reviews on hosted sites. Hosted sites might limit properties by default (ie. on the hosted site at large) but the review page would still show all properties. This is now fixed.
Reply-To on inquiry response. You may have noticed recently that when you replied to an inquiry in your email, the response came back to the OwnerRez help inbox (us!). This is because a recent update changed the Reply-To header on new inquiry notifications to point to help@ and not the guest's email address. We put it back like it was. All's well that ends well.
Good news - it’s Friday!
In answer to the recent house party shootings that have been in the news, Airbnb banned parties and events outright, worldwide, and capped the occupancy for all listings to 16. Airbnb says that 16 people is no "magic number," and that they will "continue to enforce our party rules against groups of any size and will be taking action both on guests and listings if we receive reports from neighbors."
Um… What about legitimate large-event properties that cater to big groups? Lodges that sleep 40? Wedding halls? Over-reactions don’t go well when you have millions of clients with many different types of businesses.
Airbnb then said on Wednesday that they have filed confidentially for an IPO in the US. Back in July, Airbnb stated that customers had booked more than 1 million nights in a single day for the first time since March 3, so let the good times roll. Airbnb did not give a date for when it may complete its IPO, but they are shooting for the end of the year. This isn’t the first time Airbnb has looked into IPO’ing, so maybe this is just some marketing fodder?
First COVID, then Biggest Booking Day ever, then House Party Shootings, then IPO… What a year for Airbnb. Someone needs to ship a case of Xanax to 888 Brannan Street.
On Tuesday, Sonoma County Board of Supervisors temporarily approved capping the number of vacation rental homes allowed in most unincorporated parts of the county. This decision promptly limits vacation rentals to 1,943 homes, which represents the total rental permits already issued. In other words, they slammed the door shut on anyone new, but the existing VRs are grandfathered in. The measure will be in effect for 45 days. But the board will likely extend the temporary rental permit limit, which could potentially remain in place for up to two years.
Sonoma County claims that this is due to the detrimental effect of rentals on the housing market and local neighborhoods - an often repeated line by county administrators in other parts of the country. This temporary action will allow supervisors to gather data and public input for a permanent policy. We are not aware of any evidence that supports this, so hopefully the data they gather will outweigh the public input.
If you were planning an island vacation, think again. Hawaii Governor David Ige officially stated they will be pushing back the reopening date to October 1st “at the earliest” as the islands continue to see increasing numbers of COVID cases. The state's current mandatory 14-day quarantine after arrival will remain in place through the end of the summer. It is unclear if the new October 1st reopening date will actually occur. It may be extended in the coming weeks.
A warm Mahalo to all our Hawaii friends! We’re pulling for you! 🙏
Happy Friday Everyone!🌴
A three-star hotel in Cornwall is charging £1,500 a night for a room that typically costs between £135 and £170. The room isn’t available anyway, it’s fully booked! Hotel manager Gary Ricketts explained that a glitch in their booking system has allowed rooms that are unavailable to be rented out to guests via online vendors. Jacking up the rates seems to be the only way to ensure there are no more disappointed customers. Too bad they don’t use OwnerRez...
In Newport Beach CA, the City Council placed multiple limitations on vacation rentals, during their July 14th meeting. The restrictions include the number of people allowed inside the home. Owners must provide a plan outlining mitigation measures for problematic guests. Also any guest complaints must be addressed by the property manager or owner, in person, within 30 minutes. The city has also stated they are working to limit illegal rentals.
There’s a first time for everything... Earlier this month three people were shot after a late night party, held at a Sacramento-area Airbnb rental, that got out of hand. Airbnb is pursuing legal claims and damages against the guest who held the party. This is the first time Airbnb has initiated legal proceedings against a guest for throwing an unauthorized party. Currently the specifics of what Airbnb will do is unclear, but this marks a serious change in how it deals with renters who disobey the rules.
Deschutes County OR holds the very last Blockbuster store in the world. This summer, store manager Sandi Harding, has decided to list the property on Airbnb for a sleepover experience. Starting August 17th, those living in Deschutes County can request to book one-night reservations, which will take place on September 18, 19, and 20. The one-night stay costs just $4, or just about the cost of a video rental. What other stores do you think will start hosting vacation rentals?
