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Hi Y'all,

Just a quick update: When I asked this question I hadn't looked very closely (in 5+ years) at website building. I've since watched a lot of videos and read up on many reviews, here is a (very) short summary that maybe helps someone else

- Owner Reservation's Hosted site
- 3 of the major graphically oriented website builders (Wix, Weebly, Squarespace)
- Wordpress.org, Wordpress.com along with the largest eco-system for websites including frameworks like Studiopress
- Webflow: My current favorite, has an amazing graphical editor, a ton of training videos/university, and numerous advantages in security/hosting/design that appeal to me

For many people the OR hosted website will be perfect. If you want a website that stands alone from OR, then the 3 listed at top are candidates with a much smaller learning curve. Definitely look for reviews between those three because each has strengths and weaknesses. My favorite of the three is Squarespace. I'm avoiding wordpress because while it has a rich/awesome history it can be dangerous on its own (my opinion) due to security risks from plugins and requires lots of oversight. I very much want to set and forget and let a hosting company deal with protecting the content from attack, do backups, etc.

Webflow appeals to me personally because it ties into HTML5/CSS learning that helps me elsewhere in my life. I've always been a bit of a hack with them, and I'm pretty sure that Webflow will be a huge asset in learning, which appeals to me. I also like that there is a community (similar to this one) for Webflow where questions can be asked/answered. That was very important to me.... And lastly, Webflow allows amazing interactions where text and photos can move/fade based on scrolling position. That kind of thing should help ensure my website is inviting.

That's all for now - if any of my exploration works out (not guaranteed!) I'll post again sometime in the future when I have something to show.

Hi everyone,

The rate push for VRBO is now fixed. Make sure you're using the latest version of Channel Bridge and then run it!

To see if you're using the latest version and force it to update, follow this article:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/updating-channel-bridge-to-latest-version

I know it isn't much to go on, but the few reviews I saw on Openedge seem to be bad to average. I couldn't find anything on Lynnbrook group in the way of reviews. Does anyone have pros or cons for either, such as good chargeback procedure or really low-cost or rock solid handling?

SOLVED

Paul (or Chris, can't remember which ;-)) emailed me about this, and those tips along with some experimenting gave me the answer ...

Recap - I noticed that some of my automated emails, when viewed on a cellphone, didn't wrap. Each row appeared in a tiny font, and while I could pinch/zoom to make it larger, reading a paragraph was very hard. But this only happened with some emails, not all.

Problem 1: I had copy/pasted from microsoft Word a table. It looked great, helped readability, but it was somewhat wide. Removing that helped a little

Problem 2: Long links. I had about 5 links in the email that I had to replace with shortened links. Was easy to do in the OR email template editor, I just replaced the 'Text to Display' with a short description. In general I don't like doing that since I believe folks are scared to click on links, but I'm a trusted person to guests who have already paid me so not a big deal.

The way I tested all this was simple... I just kept emailing the original template to myself while deleting parts of the text. The first test I deleted 80% of the email and it looked fine. Then I tried 50% and noticed a difference (due to the first long link). Was easy after that.

I'm sharing this to help others... it's worth looking at your automated template emails in various cellphones (iphone and android) so you can see what your guests receive. Readable emails are sure to cut down on last minute panic emails/calls!

PROBLEM SOLVED.

We have an AIrbnb account that has a "co-host", me. My wife has the main account under her name and email address. Co-Hosts dont have access to payment information, therefore it was not downloading during the Channell download. Once I logged into her account on Airbnb, then downloaded the Channel import information on her account, and uploaded to OR, ALL the payment data was there! Thanks Chris!

Thanks so much! That's a great feature to have while I'm still relying on VRBO pretty heavily. Will be testing this out soon. (And clicking a button to pull over rates is no biggie compared to all of my individual spot rates! ha ha

Appreciate it!

Yep, working on it. We saw that recently based on something VRBO changed. We're tracking it and will have an update out shortly.

I spoke too soon:

PushRates request received
To VRBO/HomeAway listing # 4117934
360 rate groups and 0 fees received
Finding csrf token
Checking to see if calendar rates are configured
Found calendar rate end point
Sending rates to VRBO/HomeAway
Error processing data. Try again or contact support.

Paul,

you're right!

Is there anyway for y'all to create a token that would take the address as it comes from VRBO and morph it into the full zillow url? So that I could make an automated email that is sent to me at booking?

Seems like it would only need to replace spaces with the hyphen and append _rb/ at the end

I looked at that, my problem is I have two adjacent townhomes and a large building with five apartments. I highly doubt it's something that Khalid devices in a densely populated area would be of much help. That seems appropriate for out in the sticks. I did get a noise aware, it is currently sitting in a box.

I was under the impression that there was one or more black lists of bad guests on Facebook. Dunno where.

The concept of looking at a guest's place is actually brilliant. Or perhaps Street View of Google maps. imagine if their house was an empty lot or nonexistent. It might help uncover the occasional scam.

apparently so. Now it is importing charges correctly ( Thanks Chris!)

Thank you!

Hi, I know this is a somewhat specific request, but is there a chance to enhance the email triggers such that it triggers an email on a specific day (or days) of the week for a booking? I like to remind guests to take the outside garbage pails to the road for Friday mornings. Depending on the booking, they may be staying over several Fridays. I have an email template that reminds them to take the pails to the road but I have to manually send it every Thursday while renters are there. It would be so great if OR simply sent this email out however many times for a booking - if the booking covers one or more Thursdays. I can think of a few other emails to send out (ie the pool guy comes every Monday morning....etc).

I find the email triggers to be one of the most useful features of OR!

Glenn

Gotcha. Yeah, that's a totally different thing.

This appears to work:

https://www.zillow.com/homes/218-Pompano-Ln-Surfside-Beach,-TX-77541_rb/

That's just an address with "_rb/" on the end.

And I've confirmed that with other addresses just now too, so that should work for you if the formatting of the guest address works right in the URL they way the guest has typed it.

Okay, I think I see the source of the misunderstanding ....

I'm not wanting to share a zillow link to my properties
I'm am wanting to get a preformatted link to the property address of my guests

For instance, Guest Jim Smith has address 123 Sanders Street, Anywhere TX 11111

I'd like to see the zillow listing for that address. Maybe it's not his home (meaning he rents) but it's helpful nonetheless to get some sense of the address that my guests list. What I do with that isn't always clear of course. If someone is living in a mobile home for instance would I do anything different? Of if their house is a 5M estate in Key Largo? Who knows... It just helps add some context to the messaging that we exchange. Maybe the only situation that would raise a red flag would be if the address is fraudulent.

In any case, I don't think there is any way to format a link using just a property address. This kind of link works: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/218-Pompano-Ln-Surfside-Beach-TX-77541/26540342_zpid/ but it only works with the zillow ID at the end. I think that as recently as 2010 it was possible to access zillow at an arbitrary address using the URL, but that seems deprecated now.

I guess that in my case what I could do is send an email with the address to my crm and then do all the zillow searching in the background . But that wouldn't help anyone else of course.

Let me know if I'm still missing something. the missing key here is WHAT the url would need to look like, and HOW to create it from the fields for booking address + the fixed parts.

They claim to be able to most of the time ignore things like iPads, AppleTVs, etc. In their support articles there is one about copying calendar links from Airbnb and VRBO into the Party Squasher mobile app. I wonder if the same thing would work for OwnerRez? There must be a way to match the party squasher sensor to a specific property. Don't know how it would work for multiple sensors and properties.

Randy

You can set up property level field codes, not just booking ones. Create a property-level field code called PXZILLOW and then you'd enter the Zillow URL (or even just slug) for each property one time. You would then embed that short code anywhere you want to use it.

I'm not following how this would work, can you give some more specifics? I'm familiar with setting up the custom field itself (eg: for keycodes) but that requires manual update per booking. That's more work than just doing the search myself.

I did a quick google search and I don't know that it's even possible to preformat a link to zillow as a url (eg: www.zillow.com/homes/123 smith street, anywhere, US)... Seems that it needs to be done with an API call.

It would be fine to get an email that is preformatted, so all I have to do is click and inspect the result. What I'm looking for is automation that saves steps and helps ensure I get interrupted (by an email is fine) with either the summary or at least a link.

I didn't think (and still don't) that the zillow API has a cost.
https://www.zillow.com/howto/api/APIOverview.htm

I can send you a detailed workflow that shows how to use POST (or GET) to retrieve property details, but that's more complicated than I am thinking.

I don't mind doing more research on this, but if your suggestion to use custom code + automated email template can be set up one time so it works for all new bookings, that would be sufficient. I'm going to have to personally view the webpage anyway, I can't avoid that step, just want to avoid needing to manually update each booking.

Stacy - I haven't looked at this in awhile, but I remember learning about a way to keep daily rates in OwnerRez and then push them to VRBO and other places. I'm in the same situation, rates for a given day are unique based on how far in future, is it a gap day, is a around a holiday like presidents day, etc.

I'm not sure that I want to rely on a 3rd party for dynamically adjusting the rates, seems like doing it myself is a worthwhile activity.

My point is - look into pushing rates from OR into VRBO, instead of the reverse. I believe that the OR team is working to enable that through the channel bridge extension for Chrome.

Stacy, also check this support article out. Forgot we had this one:

https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/renter-legal-agreements

For sure. Create a custom field definition called Property Zillow Link (with short code PXZILLOW) and then fill in that Zillow URL in that new custom field on every property. Then, in your email templates, you would use that PXZILLOW short code to have it dynamically inserted.

We've looked into background search API/partnerships in the past but back-burned it. We were in serious discussions about it at one point. One of the big problems is that they are pretty expensive. The buy rate is about $30 per report. For most VR users, that isn't cost effective. Even at half or a third of that, it would still cost too much to be effective. There are some public APIs we might be able to use to auto-fill guest data and we've looked at this too but haven't moved forward.

Hi again Stacy, sorry for the lack of support articles on the subject! One of our major goals for 2019 is correcting that.

Basically, the renter agreement is presented to the guest one of two ways:

1) For direct bookings (when viewing/accepting a quote or the guest books through your website) the guest is shown your renter agreement as one of the pages in the booking workflow. The fill in POC info, read and sign the agreement, make payment and so on. The booking is then created and the renter agreement is stamped into a PDF and the signature applied and the PDF is stored on their booking under the Legal tab and Files.

2) For channel or imported bookings, you can go to the Legal tab under the booking and use the Request button to send them a link to the agreement to sign. Every booking has a unique link. You can also automate this by creating email templates and triggers to ask the guest to sign (with that unique link) right after the booking is imported.

You can use the Legal tab of the booking > Request button to send the guest a URL to sign at any time even if they already signed one before.

Never heard of that before. Brilliant little tool! No promises, but I did fire off an email to them and ask if they have integration options. That might be a cool stat to show on bookings - how many devices showed up at the house. Of course with all the IoT devices out there, each guest might really have more than 1 device. Watch, phone, laptop - all from one physical person. I suppose this device might be able to delineate those things.

That's PERFECT! Thank you so much. And yes, definitely a much better solution. I rarely have problems and take a small deposit that covers the little things. -That's more to make them feel accountable than concern about the little things.

Thank you!!! Yes, I'd actually like to have the inquiry (& booking) widget at the top of every page but right now I'm adjusting rates almost daily in VRBO based on demand to get traction again with the listing after having a management company fail with it. I haven't been able to get the VRBO rates to feed OR yet but once I do, that's definitely a priority. (I'm now remembering how much work this was last year and why I considered a management company in the first place! haha)

GOOD POINT about the reviews. I'll be sure to add a page and a nav item for those.

Thanks for the feedback!

Yes, our damage protection (ARD) product covers all bookings equally. You don't pick or choose (or offer it optionally to guests on a case by case basis) like you do with travel insurance. It covers everything by default. If VRBO guests buy the CSA policy, then you would have double coverage yes. I would not trust the CSA coverage however - it requires admission of guilt by the guest in order to be paid out which can be a large obstacle. Our product was designed to be low cost (a spread risk model) and not involve the guest.