How he gets over 90% occupancy on his STR portfolio

0:00You can reverse engineer other people's revenues on Airbnb so we just use the Airbnb platform we'll do a search for listings and try to find like the most similar listings that we can find open up their calendar look for Block dates we search all these different dates put them into an Excel file and try to recreate their calendar what are their prices per night do they change they have minimum length of day do they got weekly discounts other discounts whatever we can also go back to their reviews and count how many reviews they have so we can see in the past ballpark how many reservations they have and we can do all this num like all this math and extrapolate because you don't get a guarantee but there's not a software in the world that can guarantee it either I even spoke with one of the main representatives for wheelhouse not wheelhouse airdna and airdna said we don't have a tool for Arbitrage yet so you can't really do comps for Arbitrage on airdna anyway

0:50and that made me feel a lot better about the fact that I've been teaching people to do all their market research on Airbnb for free anyway yeah and we can reverse engineer with pretty good accur accuracy what they're getting booked at and at the same time you could look at that listing and find out if they're not changing their prices at all ever you can tell that they're leaving money on the table you know at peak season and slow season for certain reasons it also makes it very easy to find out what price point gets booked at what in what seasons when their prices don't change right so if they're somebody say $200 a night every single day and you can see that they've got eight reviews in October and two reviews in June you can tell that that $200 that gets gobbled up one month and doesn't in the other so it's having a like a a small bundle of

1:38listings that you go through their calendars and kind of reverse engineer you can find out what prices are working what's not working what design styles are working what property sizes are working you can just get it all done and know and you may decide after that market research that the property that you thought you were going to pick up you you decide you'd rather pick up a different property because of the Insight that you get right off of airb be yeah it's so funny because that that's very similar to the process that that I teach to I don't I don't recommend paying for the a paid version of air DNA because I've just seen it be so far off and we kind of reverse engineer as well and it's amazing how many people like leave that same price and they're like I have a $200 a night property and it's like no you don't it could be a $ thousand dollar a night in the summer and 100 in the winter but so when

2:27It comes to occupancy that's that's been more more of the challenge I think and and I think getting you know people that I work with the engineer mindset they want to get to that like exact like it's 55% occupancy that's what it is because that's like that everything has to be specific numbers and I say the same thing you're never going to get exact you want to get the closest Ballpark and then we always estimate the most conservative version of that but how do you come up with occupancy it feels like that's a little bit more challenging than pricing it should always be over 90% 94 96% but the question is at what price right so I've been working on a new Revenue management model something a little bit more visual than I normally teach and it breaks up occupancy into zones you know the concept of lead time right five

3:15days in advance is more last minute than 20 days in advance two months out is better right and if you took all those dates and broke them up into little zones and like say Zone one was everything more than 90 days away zone five is everything inside of 10 days and you break up the zones your zones will change per property if you're Urban if you're on an island property size your zones will change because lead time Behavior does change on property size and location but then your goal is to orchestrate your booking traffic to get a healthy amount of bookings in every single zone where in peak season you're cool with those zones being more last minute but in slow season you want though you want to get booked first in slow season last in peak season for example I also I just finally almost

4:04Finished this book it is a book on Revenue management and I'm GNA announce its launch at Str wealth I don't think this podcast is coming out before then so the revenue manager's handbook written by Yours Truly it's available for pre-registration it's not for sale yet nice my very first book and it is pricing strategy congratulations that's awesome yeah so is it gonna be on Amazon I assume I'm gonna self-publish and self sell and Amazon can go take a hike for as long as we can sell the book on our own so nice so what's the website to to get the book for people who want to just my name good luck spelling that Rocky gs.com handbook so yeah it's it's exciting I've been writing five different books over the course of a few years and when I was asked to speak about Revenue management next week at Str wealth conference it

4:53Gave me this moment of like I could use this as a this has to get done now because I'm I'm ADHD right and I I like to do things until I'm good at them and then they they're no longer life or death anymore I want I want to become a master of something but then I become less fixated once I feel like I'm sufficient and so writing books are like that oh like this is a good book and then I just kind of like push it to the side because I feel like I accomplished something writing half of a good book and I was like if I don't do something this thing's never going to come up so well it's surprising to hear that because your your content is very consistent and and it's great you put out a lot of it so in a way the content's incomplete too because for the six years I've been a YouTuber I've never scripted any of my videos wow just I'll turn on the camera and

5:41Talk that's kind of what I do that's my vibe and there's been a lot of good content in there but then there's also been a long lot of like really drawn out intros a lot of me rambling and tangents and trying to explain stuff right if anybody who watch my content four years ago bless them for hanging in there with me lately they it's become more concise because I've really learned what makes for a better YouTube video lately but in that way I feel inspired and I want to do something and then I'll do it and then I can't be bothered after that so like thank God I've got three editing teams because I mean I just won't don't have the time to edit my own content you know yeah but I think being a YouTuber is great for someone like me because I don't really have to finish much I just have to be motivated for 30 or

6:3040 minute stretches yeah that's great yeah I've been working a lot more on batching myself and trying to be less scripted I was taking way too much time to script so I I admire the fact that you can just press record and take it from there so that's awesome bullet point opinion bullet point opinion right that's like usually here's the bullet points and I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna here's my hot take per bullet point that's more my style that's great so you mentioned your cleaning team I'm curious what your back how many units do you have now and then what does your backend team look like to manage that many units efficiently 119 currently we took a little bit of step back on a couple buildings we have I would say roughly one housekeeper

7:18Per five doors but that may not be completely accurate I don't run the housekeeping teams directly a girl named Spencer does and we have one leadership position so some of them are supervisors whatever so we've got a leadership position above and one out of every three housekeepers is either leadership or management in in that way sometimes one out of every four but we do a lot of remote quality assurance remote walkthroughs and stuff so we need people to go through a lot of photos to make sure that everything's good that's probably the main thing with supervising hourly staff is you have to inspect what you expect make sure that they're doing a job jobs right but yeah one housekeeper can clean four or five apartments in a day if they're not too nuts if they're messy then they have to report to

8:07Us like hey this one somebody threw a party or something will slightly restructure the day but yeah one housekeeper per five doors I think is pretty healthy got it and and it's all apartments that that you have for the most part we have some houses we started picking up houses on Revenue share a little over a year ago okay so houses mostly pars okay but your your housekeepers will still go over to the houses and it's not like they're just Okay cool so it's a very hierarchal model and you've got a main manager then for the whole cleaning team and is she like salary or do you pay her hourly or so salary for all the all the managers that aren't in the field a lot okay as we pull them out of field work they they move into a salary position people who do a lot of field work are still hourly

8:55Our housekeepers are about 17 bucks an hour some a little less still but most of our hiring has been at 17 lately wow yeah I can see how that saves a lot of money then and then in terms of guest relations and bookings and questions and all that what does your team look like for that we have one person on shift from 10: a.m. Till midnight they that person changes they're not working the whole day yeah but the bottleneck is there's one person for almost all communication from 10:00 a.m.

9:28To midnight then the housekeeping supervisor there's going to be like a housekeeping like manager on duty that does all the housekeeper correspondence for throughout the day and so it's like we have a back of house manager during prime time and then a front of house person all day every day so the back of house and the front of house communicates in case there's issues damages theft holdovers whatever but somebody gets up at like 10: 9:30 whatever starts responding to all the messages from after midnight we just have like a we're not available from Midnight to 9: and so they start to get respond to all those messages from overnight and then we provide support until midnight and then that just back house person makes sure that if we have to move people around or have to somehow play with the schedule there's still that communication between front and back house interesting

10:17Wow and the the front of house person that talks to the guests are they State side or are they foreign we have 100% USA based staff no V well they're you could call them B they're remote workers but nobody oversees them