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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?
Wednesday update time! After a small week last time, we came roaring back with 26 shiny new ones for you, led by a redesigned blog and short links for guests.
Hey - if you're reading this from the blog, look around! Notice anything new?
We finally brought our blog into the 21st century with a new layout and design. You can now read blog posts comfortably from your smartphone, search for articles or follow along by category. Some new imagery, intros and other things were added as well.
If you used to follow blog comments by RSS, sorry - we removed that. We also changed the main RSS feed to only include an intro body and removed social media links that we don't use anymore. Is Google+ even a real thing anymore?
We've wanted to overhaul our "www side" for awhile, but we've been too busy with other things (you know... channels, messaging, hosted, SMS) to get to it. Over the next year, we'll be allocating extra development time to making this a reality piece by piece. The blog was the first to go!
If you're frustrated with Booking.com breaking your guest links, get in line! We all are. This past week we released a new link-shortening feature where guest links are automatically shortened by default. The longer original links will still continue to work but, by default, they will now appear shorter. This took some clever work, and you may not have even noticed it, so take a second to go see what I mean....
Open any booking > Transactions tab > Request button > Request Payment. When the window opens, take a look at the URL. It used to look like this:
https://app.ownerrez.com/forms/bookings/12345678987654321/payments/add
But it now looks like this:
https://orez.io/v1/l/12345678987654321
There's nothing you need to do to use this new shorter URL format - it will be used automatically. If you had field codes in email templates that render links, the short URLs will now be used by default.
This should stop Booking.com's message thread from breaking all the links you send with email. It will also help in Airbnb and SMS conversations where messages are sent in short plain text. Cleanliness is next to godliness.
While we were here, we went ahead and re-enabled the "failed payment " message that used to be sent to Booking.com guests when a payment failed. Awhile back, we stopped sending the message because the links were being mangled by Booking.com. Now that the links are short, they won't be mangled, so the message is back! To be clear, Booking.com is always alerted, automatically under the covers, when a payment fails, but the extra message helps remind the guest because it goes into the booking message thread on Booking.com.
Lots of tweaks and enhancements this week!
We upgraded our "www side" to use FontAwesome 5 similar to the recent update that hosted websites got. It looked so nice on hosted websites, we wanted to get in on the action!
Depending on how you block-off time, the system used to associate an owner with the blocked-off time for those clients that have PM (property management) turned on. We turned that off. Blocked-off time no longer have owners.
We noticed a high number of clients had broken email templates because of how link-based field codes were used - ie. field codes that render links for the guest to click on. If the field code was placed in the wrong spot, or included a certain type of formatting, the link would break because of the email formatting around it. We completely overhauled the link editor on email templates (and renter agreements) to insert specific field code links from a drop-down list.
This also means you don't need to copy/paste field codes back and forth from somewhere else. Just highlight the text you want to link, click the link button and you'll see everything right there in front of you.
If you want to insert your own custom URL, you can do that too by selecting the top "Custom Web Address" option.
There's another great little easter egg in there... If you happen to select the renter agreement link (BULEASE) the window will show you an extra drop-down list of all your renter agreements and let you select which of your renter agreements to link to as an extra parameter:
Have you ever wanted to search your bookings based on an old booking number from a different system? You might have recently joined OwnerRez and had a different numbering system in the past. You can now search for bookings based on a legacy booking number from the top omni-search bar. If you're not sure how to set (ie. add or remove) a legacy booking number, check out the Info tab on any booking.
Awhile back, we added a yes/no option for Travel Insurance during quote acceptance where guests could see Travel Insurance options, what each option costs and choose to include or decline coverage inline. On the decline option, we tell the guest that they may not receive a refund. But what if they can receive a refund? Now that our custom Cancellation Policy feature is out, it's easy for the system to know if the guest will get a refund and under what conditions, so we added a "View refund policy" link that can be clicked to view what the actual policy is right then and there.
We converted several more system alerts to the new format including new-inquiry notifications and calendar sync notifications. About that - sorry for the bad Reply-To header! After we released the new format, a bunch of emails starting flooding in from clients responding to inquiries because the Reply-To header was coming to OwnerRez. We fixed that. Replies to inquiries notifications should now be correctly going to the guest.
The default renter agreement had some old CSS (ie. styling and formatting) that made tables look silly, particularly borders and margins. We removed that formatting on tables in the default renter agreement.
Ever send an email to a guest and you get back a bounce message, but it's not really a bounce. It's more of an "out of office" notification? These are known as auto-responders, and they're annoying because you keep getting them every time you send an email to the same recipient. In some cases, the recipient may have a setting turned on in their email program to say some completely-unnecessary thing like "Thanks for your email - I'll respond shortly! Please consider the environment before printing! Have a blessed day!". Over and over and over.... We noticed that this happens a fair amount of the time and, given the huge amount of email that OwnerRez sends, it adds up. So we updated our bounce detection code to check for these type of soft bounces and, if found, not bother you about them with an extra email. You can still see if there was an auto-responder, or some other type of soft bounce, by looking at the master Communication History area in the app.
Blog post order in forum discussions. You may have noticed in the past that new blog posts, curiously, showed up lower down in the Latest Discussions list in the forums area. This has now been fixed.
Expired security holds. Just because a security hold is successfully held, originally, does not mean it's still good later on. Unfortunately, holds can expire and our re-authorization process may not fully work in certain situations. We added some display logic to the Transactions tab on the booking to show if the security hold expired or can't be collected against.
Center menus with lots of links on hosted websites. Our new header customization for hosted websites is pretty cool, but it allows you to make some pretty wild menu layouts. Some clients had centered menus with many links, and it caused the menu to push left or right and use the header space in non-optimal ways. We fixed this so that centered menus look better.
Property info page showing wrong currency. Did you know properties can have a different currency than the account at large? Yep. But the property info page was showing the global account currency instead of the property-specific one. That is now fixed!
Travel Insurance "final payment" text. As of now, our current insurance partner has dictated that Travel Insurance must be purchased by the initial booking date or within 30 days of arrival. That's standard Travel Insurance of course - CFAR has different rules. We removed some text that said that Travel Insurance could be purchased by the final payment date because that is incorrect.
Clarified second payment days in default renter agreement. This only applies to the default renter agreement, if you happen to use that. The language was unclear about the second payment days relative to the booking date and arrival date, so we clarified it. If you use the default agreement, take a look at that and see if you like it! You can always make a copy and modify it to say anything you want.
New Airbnb changes. Sigh. Airbnb sometimes changes their API specs without providing notice to partners. We updated some API logic for Airbnb that broke because of this.
Don't import invalid Airbnb property types. Airbnb's property types (eg. villa, guest house, cabin) include some old types that aren't valid anymore, by which I mean they don't allow you to select them now but you could have selected them before. In our Listing Import for Airbnb, we are now detecting the old ones and skipping past them.
Remove Villa/Loft from duplicate property group categories. Just what it sounds like - we had some duplicate property types that were removed.
Disabled channel mappings button when channel is de-authorized. If a channel is de-authorized, for whatever reason, we are now detecting that and now allowing you to change property mappings. Doing that before would create a crash message, so we disabled the button to stop the crash messages.
Season name on minimum night validation. This one has been around for awhile. When you get a minimum night validation message (eg. "This property requires 4 nights") the system would sometimes insert a season name even though the rate wasn't from that season. This was confusing for guests and we fixed it.
Custom sources white-space. To help fix some common error patterns, we are now trimming off white-space on the front and end of the domain field on custom sources.
Overused "Using System Alert" field on emails. On communication history, the email view was showing a "Using System Alert" field on many alerts even if there was no alert type showing on the email. Or in other case,s the wrong alert type was showing. This is now fixed.
Quote status. We fixed an issue where quotes were not correctly switching to 'preempted' or 'expired' status, when bookings updated, unless they had custom cancellation policies.
Good news - it’s Friday!
Hope is on the horizon! A nationwide Vrbo survey of families shows change in travel habits due to COVID-19. Vacation rentals ranked number one among the types of vacations respondents say they want to take now through December. Travel data from Vrbo indicates families want to take longer vacations. Interest in one, three or four-week stays have grown relative to the total number of searches. Compared to this same time last year, searches for longer stays are up 25%. The ability to work from anywhere has brought a big opportunity for more travel during the second half of 2020.
Laguna Beach CA, asks Coastal Commission support for clamping down on short-term rentals in residential areas. As people flock to the coast for vacation, the dilemma of limiting vacation rentals has been brought to the table. Some of the problems with having short-term rentals mixed in residential areas can be in the form of, noise complaints or parties disturbing quiet areas, traffic congestion or parking issues and trash left behind. But the positive side says they also are a way of providing a lower-cost option to beach resorts, allowing public access to the coast. What do you think?
Hawaii Tourism Authority (HTA) released their June vacation rentals report on Tuesday. Statewide, slightly under 14% of vacation rentals were occupied in June. In comparison, hotel rooms saw just under 16% occupancy in June. On Hawai'i Island, Kaua'i and Maui County, legal short-term rentals were allowed to operate, but only as long as they were not being used as a quarantine location. On O'ahu, short term rentals were flat out not allowed to operate. Anyone going to Hawaii this fall?
Just a couple updates to talk about this week and all bug fixes:
Widgets and IE 11. We dropped support for Internet Explorer 11 a few weeks back, but only for the internal app that owner and PMs see. Public websites and widgets were still supposed to support IE 11, but widgets didn't. We fixed that so widgets now work in IE 11.
Airbnb listing import. Airbnb recently changed some things about their listing format that broke our importer. We have now fixed this so that you can once again import listing data for your properties.
Tag filtering and deleting. Our new Tag feature is exciting, but we had a couple bugs sneak out in the release - specifically when filtering and deleting tags. Those have now been fixed.
Guests *can* write reviews on OwnerRez. Go to their Booking and look for the Reviews tab - there's a button to send them a request to fill out a review. Those will be stored in the OwnerRez database, and displayed on your website.
Sad that guest cannot leave reviews on Ownerrez.
I hope this is soon corrected as I don't want to send guest somewhere else to write a review or submit it to me so I can submit it as that seem to be from neanderthal times
i tried the use of tags. However, it doesn't show up on reflect when i am looking at the list of inquiries ...under the column Tags, it still shows "none"
Here at OwnerRez, we understand how much time and effort goes into running a vacation rental business. From time to time, we like to interview a standout user that has been with us for awhile and get a sense of their background and operation. Admittedly, it's been awhile since the last one, but we're back in the interview chair and excited to restart this series!
Recently, we reached out to Mitch and Cathy at Warren Beach Rentals. Their website and operation can be found at WarrenBeachRentals.com or on their Facebook page. Below are the questions we asked Mitch and Cathy and the interesting responses they gave.
Mitch Warren: We bought our first condo 25 years ago on June 4. I was expecting a nice check at the end of the first month, and instead, the management company sent me a bill that included three new vacuum cleaners, replacement of “worn” salad tongs, advertising fee of $1000, along with various and other sundry charges.. when I got my statement I actually OWED them money. I thought, these guys are crooks, there has got to be a better way. We found a start up company called VRBO and was their first client in northwest Florida with a VRBO # of 475 that is still in existence today. [Editor note: Yep, still there!]
We built up a nice rental book on that condo, and sold it to buy 2 more. The person that bought the condo asked us “since you have it booked already, would you do this for me..?" and like that, Warren Beach Rentals was born. Over the next 25 years we bought and sold about 40 properties and beginning in 2017 we had 12 that we managed. My oldest son graduated college and moved to Destin and wanted to grow the business, my second oldest has since joined him. In 2018 we found OwnerRez that allowed us to effectively scale our business and today Warren Beach Rentals now has an office, full time staff, and we run right at 100 rental properties from Destin, to 30A, to Panama City Beach.
Mitch: I was and still am a State Farm Agent, with my office in Hendersonville, Tennessee.
Mitch: The vacation rental business was always a side job for me and my wife, it allowed us to control our own beach rentals along with some folks that had asked us to help them out.
Mitch: I am in Tennessee, but it is a 45 minute direct flight to Panama City Beach, we travel back and forth at least 15-20 times per year. We still have kids in high school, so Tennessee is still home for us now.
Mitch: We love the Florida panhandle, the weather, the people, the sand and water. It's Just simply better than anywhere else we have found.
Mitch: Being able to have ownership of my business and control over how it is run. Vacation rental business is not commoditized like so many other businesses. When we pour our hearts into the business, and guests have a wonderful time, its just so rewarding to be part of their families beach memories that they are creating. We love the beach, that shows in everything we do. We are truly excited for each guest every time they arrive and smell that salt air and see that blue water.. it never gets old being part of that experience.
Mitch: It never stops. This is not a business for the faint of heart. Guests' needs come before your own. You had better have a true passion for serving others in a compassionate and kind manner. It definitely gets in the way of "free time". You have to have a family that understands that and is supportive.
Mitch: Scaling and automation. Being able to create a booking across multiple platforms, bill, communicate, and get all of necessary documentation through automation is essential. We are able to touch our clients at the time of booking, just before their stay, 24 hours after arrival, the day before departure, then 2 times after their stay at the time of booking all in our templates and triggers.
Mitch: The calendar display is fantastic and the web page they helped prepare is useful and intuitive. We have found OwnerRez a fantastic partner in growing our business and have truly enjoyed our partnership.
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Thanks, Mitch and Cathy! We have enjoyed the partnership too. And that's really what it is for us - a partnership between good people who care about what they do. We wish Warren Beach Rentals well as they continue growing and building their stellar reputation!
From time to time, we showcase OwnerRez users that show exemplary work. This week, we talked to Jeanne from Groome & Morales and MyPCBCondo.com. Their website and operation can be found at MyPcbCondo.com or on their Facebook page for property Retro Ranch. Below are the questions we asked and her responses.
Jeanna: I am a realtor in Memphis. My husband Billy and I own our own brokerage here - Groome & Co Realtors which can be found at groomeco.com - so vacation rentals seemed a natural side business. To build retirement income and an investment portfolio, we chose short term vacation rentals instead of doing long term rental homes in my local market for diversity and a little fun for when we stay. I bought my first VR in Destin with my husband in 2000 when my oldest child was a pre-schooler and have owned one ever since.
We sold in 2005 and selected Panama City Beach as an area of revitalization and growth as Destin was saturated and the traffic had become so awful. We have seen vast economic changes in the market (due to the mortgage crisis of late 2000’s) but we held on and “rode the wave” and are so glad we did. We also have a lake house in hot springs Arkansas that we started.
My sister Jolynna Morales is also a realtor and partners with me on our 3 bedroom Regency Towers condo in PCB. Her husband is a talented contractor so that comes in handy for renovations! My family has spent many happy times and made great memories in our rentals.
Jeanna: I've been a broker for 27 years.
Jeanna: I'm from Memphis and manage the Florida properties remotely.
Jeanna: To travel and participate in different real estate markets while building equity and long term investment value.
Jeanna: Headaches and repairs. (laughing)
Jeanna: I love love love OwnerRez. It saves me from doing repetitive tasks and from forgetting to send an alert to cleaning staff or instructions to guests. The hosted website is a wonderful integration for a one stop shop for all my VR needs.
Jeanna: So many things, but I believe the integrated hosted website is extremely valuable - I spent days creating my own stand alone site before OwnerRez offered this. I would like to see additional enhancements to the hosted options, but its functional and simple. We are now booking the MAJORITY on our own; we're not longer hostage to Vrbo. (laughing)
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Thanks, Jeanna and Jolynna! We love you too! ❤️️ Our hosted website feature is an ongoing project with many coming enhancements that we look forward to adding, so keep watching on that.
We wish Groome and Morales much success in the Panama City Beach area as they continue to manage their business and thrive in the vacation rental industry!
Every now and then we like to shine light on one of our outstanding users. We know how much time and effort go into operating a vacation rental business. When we see someone excelling at this, we like to share how they do what they do best. This week we’re back in the interview chair with Ocean Property Corp & Design.
Kristin Martin, Faith Marasco and Mary Salazar are the masterminds behind Ocean Property Corp & Design. Their website and operation can be found at OceanPropertyCD.com or on their Facebook page. Below are the questions we asked them and the insightful responses they gave back.
Kristin: Ocean Property Corporation and Design represents a prestigious collection of luxury vacations homes on the Texas Gulf Coast since 2014. We are fun and energetic team who have a passion for sharing the local lifestyle and making a vacation getaway memorable. Each one of us, ladies, comes from diverse backgrounds. Thus, bridging our talents to give our guests the best overall experience in Southern Hospitality.
Kristin: I have been in hospitality in some way shape or form my entire career. I have lived all over the USA and traveled the globe due to my hotel/restaurant background. My studies included culinary arts/hospitality and wine. I started my career in the “back of the house” and made my way to the “front of the house”, terms used when working in the industry. To help those understand what these terms mean is when someone works back stage to the front of stage; ie; kitchen to the main dining floor. Having worked in every facet has provided me with the tools to truly understand how each department must work together in order to make the vision work.
Kristin: Does an 11th career apply? 😊
Kristin: It’s an eyeful even if I take out some of my passion side hustles. Line Cook, Sous Chef, Maitre’d, Lead Server, Bartender, Bar and Wine Marketing Manager, Outside Sales-Wine and Spirits Sales Representative, Outside Sales- Wine and Spirits Specialist, Outside Sales- Director of Chain Accounts, Outside Sales -Director of National Accounts State of Texas and Louisiana.
Kristin: I have been living in Texas for over 12 years, but I'm not from the area.
Kristin: Everything is bigger in Texas! I moved here from Las Vegas. I have a friend, who happens to be a talent hunter and well known culinary leading lady in Vegas who wanted me to open up a new hotel here in Downtown Houston.
Kristin: It is fluid, never dull and keeps me on my toes. Oh and I can work from anywhere I want in the world.
Kristin: I think this is a two part answer. From a work-life balance approach and from an actual constant trend that I find challenging, I have to remind myself turn it off. Since our booking calendar never shuts off it’s important to make sure I take time for myself. It is easy to get sucked into the email abyss and find yourself 12 hours later, cross-eyed.
We are a small family business, finding time to take a vacation ourselves can be somewhat difficult and I must have Wifi/technology at all times.
Coming from a corporate world in restaurant/hotel business, I have to remind myself as well as our guests we are not a hotel accommodation. We do not have the staff that would typically come with a hotel accommodation. Some of our talented staff must commute (long hours) to the area. We are in a remote coastal location that is heavily influenced by the climate, small businesses, tourists and our year round locals. VR’s are more autonomous as it allows travelers to take the wheel and drive, per se. They have the ability to experience the luxuries of both; a destination and a private residential home without being at their actual home.
Lastly, a constant trend I find is getting travelers and guests to read (this really takes the top of the dislike cake). I spend hours and hours reading through all of our 24 (soon 25) listings, troubleshooting tips and household procedures (manuals) to make sure the information is as accurate as possible. A lot of the questions that get asked over and over are in the listing, booking process and or rental agreement. Changes can occur in amenities such as: an owner makes a change and we were not informed in time to update the listing, or the salt air elements corrode a grill and we have to substitute…There is always something, but, that is what makes it always interesting.
Kristin: Oh my, we use it all. I do not even know where to begin.
We started out with OwnerRez Q4, 2019, when we were having a such terrible experience with another software and needed to make the change quickly. We solely depended on Airbnb and The Expedia Group for all of our business. Now, we can proudly say that since going live with our API integration as OwnerRez being our master hub it has helped us with our own direct hosted website, it pushes listing details, channel rules and rates to our marketing channel partners.
We have done a lot to increase our direct foot traffic, from Facebook Ads, direct social media marketing, Google Ads, SEO, direct email marketing campaigns. Our direct bookings from our direct hosted website (hosted by OwnerRez) has drastically increased. This time last year we did 8% in direct bookings, this year we are at 21% in direct bookings and more coming in! That is AMAZING!
Lastly, but definitely not least; Q1 of 2020, we signed up with Resort Cleaning to help us manage our housekeeping and maintenance; API works great here too. This helps our contractors check in and checkout, let us know when a home is turned and report damages. We are still working on this as it is rather new.
Kristin: How can you just have one? Y’all have way too many amazing features. Channel management and API with our direct marketing software partners is HUGE. Helping us manage our homes calendars, rates and descriptions is by far the best. I used to have to do this individually with multiple screens open and hours of patience. Now, I can just make a change in OwnerRez and BAM its pushed to the respective channels. When it comes time to doing invoicing for the month, OwnerRez has made a world of difference when it comes to our reporting, capturing expenses and helping us break down the reports that made zero sense to understand from the other channels (Airbnb). Can you feel the huge grateful smile through this message? Bravo Guys! Thank you for doing what you do and continue to do in VR software.
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Thanks Kristin, Faith and Mary! We love hearing how our software makes your lives easier, and we also love hearing about the path that led you to this point! We strive for excellence in everything we do, and it's clear that goes the same for Ocean Property Corp & Design. We look forward to seeing more of all the great things you will do!
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