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Happy Friday Everyone!
Florida still can’t make up its mind… Palm Beach County pauses vacation rentals reopening due to growing coronavirus cases. With a safety plan in place and the state’s approval, Palm Beach County had set the stage to let vacation rental owners welcome tourists and staycationers into their dwellings once again. But concerns about a coronavirus resurgence stopped that from going into effect Monday. “It was our hope to begin the opening on June 15th; however, data over the past few days has shown some increases in hospitalization, some increases in percentage of new COVID-19 cases over the past weeks and a bump in influenza-like illnesses in our emergency rooms,” read a statement on the county’s website. Sigh.
On Tuesday, short-term vacation rentals are allowed to resume most operations on Maui, the Big Island and Kaua'i. Owners are not allowed to rent to anyone who is undergoing quarantine. Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell has yet to submit a request to Governor David Ige to allow legal short-term vacation rentals to operate on O'ahu.
If you’re a traveler, watch out for rental fraud! Investigations are ongoing in at least three cases of rental fraud that have occurred in the last month in Holmes Beach, Florida. Visitors arrived only to find out that they really didn’t have a booking at the property they thought they’d reserved. Now Holmes Beach police officers are warning rental owners to be on the lookout for any fraudulent advertisements for their properties, and are warning visitors to be careful how they book their next vacation.
There’s an interesting case going on in the Outer Banks. A large PM is under scrutiny after reneging on an alleged promise to refund money. Dozens of guests reported the PM and now North Caroline state is investigating.
What’s particularly interesting is that the NC Real Estate Commission evidently mandates certain refund policies. Notice this line:
"If you have a contract that cannot be performed, it's not a contract, and you're due your money back," Stein [NC Attorney General] said. "We are in the process of digging into this and investigating it, and if what we find out leads us to conclude that these people are in the legal wrong and they need to pay these people back we will do whatever necessary to get these customers their money back."
What if the signed contract stated that no refunds are given for cancellations or ‘acts of god’, and the guest knew and signed to that? Does that matter? Shouldn’t the contract hold up?
COVID-19 has caused a huge downturn in rental revenue but 1 bad guest can create expenses that are totally unexpected.
We're thinking about a number of different upcoming needs at the moment, and it's quite possible that customer support might lead into those in time. So we'd be glad to consider a wide range of experience and backgrounds. With a small, fast-growing company, you never know where you may find a good fit!
OwnerRez is an incredibly powerful tool that does a lot of high level tasks automatically. But there are still some thing that take time. We'd like to hear what repetitive task you think takes the most time to do in OwnerRez.
What do you find yourself doing over and over again?
(make sure to scroll to the bottom and click the Submit button)
If the survey form didn't load, use this link instead:
What repetitive task takes you the most time in OwnerRez each week?
Great idea to recruit from your users! Any idea of a salary/hourly range? This isn't something I can take on, but I know a few people who may be good but make it a policy not to share job opportunities that don't publish a salary/hourly range.
Thanks!
I don't know if this is a bug or even related to OwnerRez but I have received two messages in my Airbnb inbox (on airbnb) and I cannot make the unread notification (dot) go away no matter how many times I open the messages. It seems to have happened since OwnerRez began showing the Airbnb inbox. Is this connected or just coincidence?
Would love to be a part of OwnerRez!!! Just listed our PCB rental with you guys and are excited for the opportunities it will bring...I manage a VA clinic and also am over QA at the clinic. Will send my info:)
Lisa Lansdell
Paul W said:
Funny - after a couple more CSR's, we're looking to add a QA as well. We produce updates faster than we can test them, so our releases get backed up on QA for a week or two. A part-CSR/part-QA would be excellent.
Funny - after a couple more CSR's, we're looking to add a QA as well. We produce updates faster than we can test them, so our releases get backed up on QA for a week or two. A part-CSR/part-QA would be excellent.
Did you mean me? LOL. mentioning that I should be on payroll? Dream retirement job for me! I can also possibly do QA testing. I just need to retire as I cannot now take on a 3rd job (between my main IT job, running 3 VRs and a construction project to boot). I will hope that opportunity will still be there later :-)
I think enough people are fed up with VRBO and their ilk. I'd love to see Houfy added (and FabStaz is affiliated with them)
Good news everyone, It’s Friday!
Airbnb joins vacation-rental sites who have begun to see a surge in demand. Antsy city dwellers seeking to escape their Covid-19 refuges are road-tripping to nearby vacation rentals in surprisingly strong numbers. This shows the first signs of life for an industry that essentially ground to a halt in March.
“People, after having been stuck in their homes for a few months, do want to get out of their houses; that’s really, really clear," Airbnb Inc. Chief Executive Officer Brian Chesky said in an interview. “But they don’t necessarily want to get on an airplane and are not yet comfortable leaving their countries."
Yes, Captain Obvious. But the key is that a lot of those people know Airbnb will give their money back (against the wishes of the host) if it's an "extenuating circumstance" so hey why not use Airbnb? 😒
Beyond Pricing’s Pandemic Pulse page has some really interesting stats coming out. West Coast and Ski markets in the US have now returned to similar booking pace levels that they were seeing before the pandemic. The East Coast and US Interior vacation rental markets continue to see historically high levels of booking pace. Australia, New Zealand, France, Portugal, and Italy are seeing steady growth in weekly booking pace that will soon get these markets back to a normal level, while other countries like Japan and Spain have yet to see travel demand return.
After contemplation and discussion spanning nearly a decade, property owners who operate short-term vacation rentals in Crow Wing County, Minnesota will now be subject to new regulations and licensure requirements beginning in 2021. The ordinance states short-term rentals will not be allowed to operate in the county without an annual license and defines these rentals as "any home, cabin, condominium or similar building that is advertised as, or held out to be, a place where sleeping quarters are furnished to the public on a nightly, weekly, or for less than a 30-day time period and is not a bed and breakfast, resort, hotel or motel."
Hey, at least they got a decade to discuss it! Most counties jumped on the regulate-short-term-rental bandwagon the moment they could. Who doesn’t like extra taxes?!
Hawaii Vacation Rental Owners Are Threatening To Sue Over Shutdown. A Honolulu land-use lawyer has sent letters to four island mayors saying local rules related to COVID-19 violate constitutional rights of property owners. “The result of preventing these rentals statewide equates to damages of approximately $100 million per month, and the collective impact on property values is easily $1 billion,” Kugle wrote. Hawaii remains under an order requiring all people flying into Hawaii to stay in quarantine for 14 days upon arriving. One issue has been how to make sure people follow the orders. While supporters of short-term rentals say their properties are safer because they’re generally less densely occupied than hotels, hotel industry executives argue that they have established policies and procedures to keep guests safe while they’re bound to their rooms. What do you think? We’re pretty sure we know, but tell us anyway!
API Integrated Channels communicate with the partner site on a preferred back-channel. This allows for the ability to push rates, availability updates, receive bookings, and much more! That being said what changes should be made to our current API integrated channels?
What new channels would you like us to support?
What existing channels need to be changed or currently drive you nuts in some way?
(make sure to scroll to the bottom and click the Submit button)
It's Wednesday, so let's talk updates!
This past week, we released a small part of the "long term stuff" I referenced last Wednesday. But what long term stuff, you say??! Think messaging. Think hosted sites. Think texting. Yeah okay, texting is kind of part of messaging.
In the next few weeks and months, you'll see that area grow more and more. There are some exciting things going on with Hosted Sites as well, but that didn't get out the door in time, so hopefully we'll cover that next Wednesday or the week after. 15 things to talk about this week...
There is now a Airbnb Messages inbox under the CRM menu that shows all of your Airbnb platform messages if you have API integration connected for Airbnb. The menu option shows a indicator of the unread messages which bubbles up to the parent CRM menu as well.
As you read or respond to messages, the indicator will change or go away dynamically.
When you open the Airbnb Messages inbox, you'll notice that it's already full of messages. This is because the inbox shows all Airbnb messages to or from any Airbnb guest, no matter where each message was sent from. In other words, even if you use the Airbnb mobile app or Airbnb website to respond, the message will still appear in OwnerRez. The Airbnb message system syncs all messages in real time to OwnerRez.
There are some filter options above the inbox that let you search for a guest name or date range. Click into a message and a normal message thread will appear underneath the guest record.
The thread follows normal messaging conventions:
It's important to understand that this is a first pass at a messaging inbox inside OwnerRez. We have other things coming in the future, but we wanted to get this out and start experimenting with the Airbnb messages since those are synced with OwnerRez under the covers.
You can send images back to the guest using the "Select File" button on the thread and it will work the same way it does on Airbnb - the photo will appear as its own message.
This does not send any email or text messages or anything other than Airbnb platform messages. We also do not have triggers or other automation built into this yet, but all of that has been discussed internally.
Play with the Airbnb Messages inbox and let us know what you like or dislike, but please understand that this is a limited inbox with no ability to send or receive regular email, texting or other channel platforms. Only Airbnb messages for now.
Enough said on that; moving on...
If you've got PM (property management) premium feature turned on, you can now see the owner's name on the property grid, filter by owner and export owner info to Excel.
While we're talking about PM, you can now also see the owner (and click through to configure) when looking at a property's info tab.
Our PM area has a lot of coming updates, but until we get to those, we are making small iterative changes to spread PM throughout more parts of the system.
By the way, fun fact - did you know you could filter the main bookings list by email templates sent (and not sent)? If you're ever wondering if any future guests haven't gotten a particular email, give that a try.
Channel integrations have also gotten some updates. As a preferred partner, we are committed to closely monitoring and talking to our channel partners (VRBO, Airbnb) and making sure we keep up with all the latest features they are rolling out - and in some cases, hounding them for more.
HomeAway API added some amenities and we jumped on supporting those. The new HomeAway amenities are EV Car Charger, Fire Pit, Enhanced Cleaning and Disinfection, and we now support those in OwnerRez and push them over with all the rest.
Airbnb added House Manual options and we now support that too.
We are also now pushing gap periods to HomeAway API based on the required gap rules in OwnerRez.
Believe it or not, some tax jurisdictions calculate tax per guest in addition to per stay or per night, so OwnerRez now supports that. You can select "per guest" as an option on tax settings and OwnerRez will calculate a special number based on the number of guests on the booking.
When bookings are un-linked from the Airbnb API calendar, it was possible for gap rules to not be followed, so we added special gap blocks around those un-linked bookings to make sure the gap rules are still adhered to.
When historical bookings were imported via Airbnb API integration, the system was skipping past cancelled bookings when merging those bookings with bookings that were already in OwnerRez. We expanded the merge process to also include cancelled bookings for Airbnb API. After all, you might want to do analysis on old cancelled bookings too, so now you can!
Listing Quality Analyzer is a great tool and now relied on by thousands of OwnerRez users. However, it sometimes returns too much information! We added a channel type filter to Listing Quality Analyzer so that you can quickly narrow down errors or warnings to just one channel.
When importing spot rates, the errors were a bit opaque, so we clarified those import messages and enhanced what we are detecting to be clearer.
When releasing a security deposit, the release button says "Release Now" but you might actually be collecting money. Do I press it?!? We updated the security deposit button to say Collect instead of Release if that's the option you're using.
Fixed multi-sort on properties grid. Previously, the grid was default sorting by display order and then property name, only not correctly. That bug has been squashed.
Pending Airbnb bookings shouldn't push availability. We fixed Airbnb API availability to not push API for pending bookings until they are confirmed.
Portal user name on emails. The booking notification emails never showed the portal user name - now they do.
Hosted sites property menu order. Not sure how this one got out the door, but hosted sites property menus were showing a wrong sorting order. After we added custom property ordering a few weeks ago, the hosted site side stopped working correctly. Fixed!
Agree with better marketing!
Thank you for gathering feedback! I'm excited for any new features you add. I've checked my top two, but the idea of having column grid layouts would really customize the look, ease of page scrolling, and more copy on each page - organized!
We have received reports from some users of difficulties sending email to hr@ownerreservations.com. We are looking into this issue; if you received a bounce message, please try again.
In addition, please feel free to also write the Helpdesk at help@ownerreservations.com if you are interested in applying for this position.
We're happy to announce that we've partnered with Wishbox. This allows OwnerRez clients to use smart tools such as online check-in with document scans, guest app, upsells, online check-out, and more.
Good to Know
Wishbox is a guest experience platform offering smart tools throughout the guest journey, from the moment the booking is confirmed until check-out.
How does it work?
The Wishbox and OwnerRez connection allows you to completely automate your guest communication, check-ins and messaging, whilst still providing guests with the best possible experience. The connection is quick and easy. By simply registering to Wishbox and connecting to your OwnerRez account, you will be able to integrate all of your rental and reservations and start communicating with guests in more efficient ways including via SMS and WhatsApp messages.
How to integrate with OwnerRez:
Take a look at our support article on how to integrate your Wishbox account with OwnerRez.
More about Wishbox:
Wishbox empowers property managers to digitize their guest experience by offering numerous smart tools throughout the guest journey from online check-in, smart upsells, branded guest app, digital check-out with review optimization, and much more.
Wishbox’s flexible online check-in wizard allows hosts to get the guest’s arrival and direct contact details ahead of time. Hosts can collect passport scans, payments, signatures, and more, allowing a smooth front desk check-in experience or a self-check-in upon arrival. Using Wishbox, properties are also able to communicate with guests with perfectly timed guest messaging, through a communication hub with direct integrations to WhatsApp, SMS, and Wishbox chat.
In addition, hosts can offer guests access to their very own guest-app, it's a web-app so no downloading is required. The guest-app includes a dedicated personal area that holds all the important information about the guests’ stay, the property, and additional services, all in the guests’ native language.
Before check-out, guests can receive a check-out message with smart review optimization and relevant offerings.
Properties can also generate more revenue from every guest by offering additional in-house services through Wishbox, accepting credit card payments, and auto split payments with external suppliers.
Better ways to market independently.
Price Consistency is an official program by VRBO and something they are requiring in the future. OwnerRez makes this simple, and does away with it as a problem completely for those on the API, but it affects a lot of people. Essentially, it means that you need to make sure your rates are exact on VRBO and not averages or estimates. Again if use the HA API with OwnerRez, we already do this for you.
It's been around for awhile, but VRBO is going to start requiring it soon for all PMs and PMS systems. Paul (the other Paul) mentioned it here recently:
https://www.ownerrez.com/blog/some-friday-news-longterm-stays-more-florida-counties-reopen
More about it on the VRBO side:
https://www.vrbo.com/discoveryhub/a/price-consistency-checklist
Though the term was coined by VRBO, we wanted to extend the same comparison check to Air and TA and other channels to the extent possible.
Now that it's been rolled out, you are correct that it makes sense to see the rate adjuster in there too - after all, that's the real rate.
Thank you Paul. I am not sure what price consistently is, and I did not think that price could be inconsistent since OR pushes it to the channel. I guess I misunderstood the purpose of the tool, i thought it was meant to provide comparison at a glance between direct OR pricing and pricing that is pushed via channel (that can be different from direct pricing due to mark up or mark down percentage).
@BlueMtn and Lydia: Thanks for the feedback - that makes a lot of sense.
The original point of this tool (Channel Rate Tester) was to see "price consistency" between OR and the channels. To our knowledge, nobody else offers this but it's highly needed. We had to lobby VRBO hard to get an API working that would let us test rates from our side dynamically, and they responded positively. In other cases, we're using heuristics to get close.
As we point out on the Airbnb option, price consistency is not possible with Airbnb because their rate engine is busted based on rounding mistakes, tax variations and other things Airbnb will hopefully fix in the future, but at least we're able to point out what the rates will be on both sides.
I think it's a great idea to add an "include rate adjustment" option so you can see your markup on there as well, but the fundamental purpose is to show price consistency as your rent, surcharges, taxes change on the OR side and you can't figure out what/where/why it's off on the channel side.
Lydia B said:
Unfortunately it does the same thing with AirBnB. I think their programming is designed to show what the charges should be based on OR rules (which is the OR column) and then shows what the OTA would actually charge. I'm with you - would prefer to see what someone would pay if they booked direct vs. going thru the OTA.
I did have a fairly terrible experience with Vacasa on Friday 6/5. It's impossible to get on the phone with them. Should mean good things for the small companies or individuals leveraging OwnerRez type software! No doubt volume has returned in the areas I work in.
Unfortunately it does the same thing with AirBnB. I think their programming is designed to show what the charges should be based on OR rules (which is the OR column) and then shows what the OTA would actually charge. I'm with you - would prefer to see what someone would pay if they booked direct vs. going thru the OTA.
I'm noticing that holidays are shown in orange on my calendar widget on my website which makes it look like the dates are booked. How can I remove the color on holiday dates?
I may be slow, not enough coffee LOL. Tried channel rate tester for HA, and it shows same numbers in top table (HA) and bottom table (presume direct?) (and not a comparison of HA vs direct). My HA is +3% so i'd expect one table have greater amounts than the other but I see the same numbers.
Saw a quote from some analyst recently, something to the effect that many tech/digital co's think that they can just get into vacation rental space without prior knowledge and just run it like a tech co but that does not really work. I do not know who bought vacasa, but they obviously do not know that selling vacation rental stays is not the same as selling $5 widgets on Amazon. Vacasa has terrible reputation in my market (and I have heard in many others), so I do not know what they are thinking that a middleman (which is what vacasa is) with very slim value proposition is somehow a good investment.
Happy Friday Everyone!
Silver Lake is betting big on the travel industry despite what is happening with the global pandemic. The top Silicon Valley tech investment firm bought big stakes in Expedia and Airbnb over the past few months, and now it is leading a $108 million Series D round for vacation rental platform Vacasa. The Portland, Ore.-based company manages more than 26,000 vacation homes in 31 U.S. states and 18 countries, and bills itself as “North America’s largest vacation rental management platform.” Vacasa interim CEO Matt Roberts, who took over in February, said he believes there will be a consumer shift toward private vacation rentals as people fear going back to hotels and other lodging options due to safety-related concerns.
According to a report from AirDNA, Vacation rentals globally have rebounded 127% since April after coronavirus lockdowns halted nearly all travel. Short-term rentals on platforms like Airbnb and VRBO reached rock bottom around April 5, but have nearly returned to pre-pandemic levels, according to AirDNA. Beach towns and other leisure destinations, especially in places that pushed to reopen quickly, are seeing the most growth. The numbers are one sign that people are starting to travel again, at least locally, as stay-at-home orders are eased, but the devastated industry is still fragile and a resurgence of cases could shut things down again.
Is anyone really able to go to Florida at this point? Florida vacation rental properties can resume operations subject to certain rules and restrictions. For more information consult Orange County’s full plan. Or consult Gulf county for their rules. Or Pasco county for theirs. Or Sumter county. Or maybe just ignore it all and do what you want.😄
Vacation rentals in the destination state of Hawaii reached only 5 per cent of total occupancy in the month of April. This represents a 68% drop in total occupancy from last year. Covid-19 travel restrictions have created a global drop in travel demand which has led to record low visitor numbers for the islands.
As most of you know, managing vacation rentals creates a lot of anxiety. COVID has impacted the industry greatly, but now that locations are starting to open back up, business is beginning to flourish. Even before the pandemic, vacation rentals were stressful enough. What are the things you worry about the most with your vacation rental business?
(make sure to scroll to the bottom and click the Submit button)
