Our co-founders have walked a mile in your shoes. Paul and Chris are really good software engineers, but more than that, they're also vacation rental homeowners and property managers. For over a decade, they have put in the work and devoted themselves to providing exceptional vacation rental experiences for their guests. Now, they devote their time to delivering industry-leading software focused on solving the everyday challenges vacation rental owners and property managers face. That's why OwnerRez is focused on the features that matter most, like having lightning-fast and deeply invested in API connections with all the top vacation rental OTAs, so you never have to worry about getting double-booked.
In this guide, you’ll see the many benefits that come with using a property management system (PMS) and how OwnerRez can help take your business to the next level through eight core features.
Channel Management
The Challenge: Vacation rental operators want to be on every major platform to maximize their booking potential and revenue, such as Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking.com, Google Vacation Rentals, and others. However, keeping calendars, prices, descriptions, photos, and rules synced across all of the different channels is extremely difficult and time-consuming.
How a PMS Can Help: A property management system can connect all of your calendars to prevent double bookings. It also provides a central place to manage listing content, pricing, and rules, ensuring your listings remain consistent across all your connected channels.
Why choose OwnerRez?
- 20+ Channel Integrations, including all the top vacation rental OTAs and an extensive network of regional listing sites.
- Direct partnerships, built entirely in-house, lightning fast, and deeply invested in
- Multi-year awards for Elite and Preferred Plus. These are awards given by Airbnb and VRBO to only their top partners.
Integrations
The Challenge: As vacation rental operators grow their businesses, managing day-to-day tasks such as pricing, scheduling cleans, setting door codes, accounting, and more becomes increasingly challenging to handle.
How a PMS Can Help: A property management system can help manage this ever-growing task list through direct integrations, such as dynamic pricing tools, automated scheduling systems, smart locks that automatically generate unique codes for every guest, and accounting software. These connections reduce manual work and keep everything running smoothly as you scale.
Why choose OwnerRez?
- 100+ certified partners and integrations which include: Dynamic Pricing, Door Locks, Guest Communication, AI, Housekeeping Services, Insurance, Automation, Accounting, Business Intelligence, Devices, Websites, Channel Integrations, Payment Processors, and more!
- We are constantly adding more and keeping the ones we have up to date!
Property Management
The Challenge: Managing vacation rentals on behalf of other property owners can quickly become complicated. Calculating commissions, creating monthly statements, and tracking expenses and reimbursements become increasingly challenging as the portfolio grows.
How a PMS Can Help: A property management system streamlines these tasks by handling commissions, generating clear monthly owner statements, and organizing expenses all in one place.
Why choose OwnerRez?
- Built-in Property Owner and PM statements, perfect for periodic (eg, monthly) reports sent to the owner, showing the owner's revenue and expenses.
- Easy tracking of expenses and reimbursements, with the added option of attaching receipts
- A wide range of reports exportable to Excel or CSV
- Owner portals with flexible access for owners, cleaners, and staff
Reporting
The Challenge: Without clear data, vacation rental owners and managers are operating in the dark. They may know their occupancy rates, but do they know which channels are driving the most valuable bookings? Which properties are underperforming? What profit they are making after expenses? It's crucial for operators to have this information quickly available to help guide decisions, but it can be challenging to gather this data from all the different channels.
How a PMS Can Help: A property management system brings all your key performance data together in one place, giving you clear insights into bookings, revenue, expenses, and property performance. Instead of pulling reports from multiple channels, a PMS consolidates this information automatically, making it easy to see which listings are thriving, where improvements are needed, and how your business is performing overall.
Why choose OwnerRez?
- A wide variety of reports that cover bookings, payments, occupancy, expenses, and channel performance.
- Export any report in CSV or Excel to quickly analyze trends and make informed decisions.
- Identify opportunities to improve property performance and make smarter, data-driven decisions.
Accounting
The Challenge: Whether managing a single property or a large portfolio, keeping track of guest payments, refunds, security deposits, and taxes is often overwhelming. When you add multiple channels and properties to the mix, the process becomes more complex and creates more opportunities for important details to slip through the cracks.
How a PMS Can Help: A property management system brings all your financial activity into one organized place, making it simple to manage invoices, payments, refunds, deposits, and taxes. With everything centralized and the ability to process payments directly, a PMS will give you more control and clarity over your business.
Why choose OwnerRez?
- Rich accounting tools with full invoicing, payments, refunds, and balance management
- Deposit syncing for Airbnb and Stripe with “to the penny” detail, including fees and adjustments
- 20+ supported payment processors and gateways, so you have the tools you need to work in the way that is best for you.
- Hosted guest payment forms with a variety of security deposit options, insurance, and other things, even if you don't have a website
- QuickBooks integration for seamless accounting workflows
Websites (Direct Bookings)
The Challenge: The major listing sites like Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com are great for visibility, but they come at a cost of ever-increasing fees, strong competition, and little control over resolving guest issues. As a vacation rental business grows, having a direct booking option becomes crucial for reducing the reliance on OTAs, fostering guest loyalty, and generating more revenue. The challenge is that creating a professional website can feel technical, expensive, and difficult to manage over time.
How a PMS Can Help: A property management system can provide a direct booking website solution that automatically syncs with your property details, photos, pricing, and availability, making it easy to manage. Bookings and payments flow right into the PMS, keeping everything in sync without extra effort. This makes it simple to offer a smooth, professional direct booking experience without spending hundreds on a website that requires continuous updates.
Why choose OwnerRez?
- Create a vacation rental website with Book Now button on your own domain name in minutes.
- OwnerRez websites are fast, optimized for mobile and SEO friendly. No technical skills required.
- Easy one-click access to beautiful website templates and pre-built pages
- Many different widgets are available that let you set up integrations with OwnerRez from your site, from inquiry/quote/book now widgets to availability calendar displays to searching properties by availability and showing rates tables and reviews.
- WordPress options, including a plugin for creating a custom site experience.
- API access for custom website builders.
- No booking commissions. Booking commissions are evil, and we've maintained a hard stance on this for years.
Messaging
The Challenge: Guests expect fast, professional communication from the moment they inquire all the way through checkout. However, with messages coming in from multiple booking platforms, email, and text, conversations can get scattered. Questions can be missed, check-in details can be forgotten, and small oversights often turn into late-night calls from frustrated guests.
How a PMS Can Help: A property management system brings all guest communication into a single inbox, making conversations easier to follow and manage from inquiry to checkout. It also allows automated messages to be sent across multiple channels for routine touchpoints such as booking confirmations, check-in instructions, and checkout reminders, ensuring important information is delivered on time without extra effort. In addition, features like SMS messaging and AI-assisted responses can save even more time, allowing the focus to stay on growing the business rather than constantly responding to guest messages.
Why choose OwnerRez?
- Powerful dynamic messaging that includes email, SMS and channels such as Airbnb and Vrbo all from one unified inbox.
- Create personalized templates that represent your brand and send automatically with powerful triggers.
- SMS text messaging that can be automated and personalized for your guests
- Rezzy AI, a powerful assistant for guest messaging and task automation that helps you manage your workflow so you can focus on what matters most.
CRM (Marketing)
The Challenge: Turning past guests into repeat guests is a significant revenue opportunity, but the major listing sites, such as Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com, make it extremely hard to access guest information to follow up after a stay. When guest details are hidden or incomplete, the customer relationship stops at checkout, and valuable repeat booking opportunities are lost.
How a PMS Can Help: A property management system allows you to retain your own guest data, making it possible to use that information for marketing later on and to build lasting relationships with past guests. By leveraging these tools, you become less dependent on listing channels and create a stronger, more resilient lead funnel for your vacation rental business.
Why choose OwnerRez?
- At OwnerRez, we believe you should own the data, which is why we provide full guest profiles that store contact details, booking history, messages, notes, and documents in one convenient location.
- An automated way to send the guest a point of contact link to retrieve the "real" email address.
- Automate and store all guest records for your own marketing efforts to build and maintain a relationship with your customers over time.
- And, of course, all of this data is exportable, allowing you to easily use it for marketing purposes.
Conclusion
A property management system can provide real solutions to the everyday challenges vacation rental homeowners and property managers face. A PMS brings all the moving parts of managing a vacation rental under one roof, helping you get time back, improve operations, and build a business that is not dependent on the OTAs. OwnerRez was built with those priorities in mind, offering tools designed to help a business run at an "elite level" and continue to grow.
If you are not yet using OwnerRez, get started today by signing up for a 14 day free trial or by signing up to join one of our weekly live demo webinars.