Episode 044 - Our Interview with Arthur Colker of Stayfi
Jun 14, 2021
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Want to know a great way to grow your business and increase your income? Marketing to past guest! But how do you get in touch with them? Many platforms, like Airbnb, won't pass emails to you or give you anyone's contact phone information but the main booking guest. Well, Stayfi is the answer!! Here is a way to collect pretty much everyone's email address and begin building your email list and potentially sharing your property with tens of thousands of others. Arthur Colker of Stayfi explains.
Plus, contest details are inside this episode! Enter to win BIG!! Go and Grow!
Transcript of this Episode:
Over the last two centuries, nearly 90% of the world's millionaires and created their wealth through real estate here to tell you how you can ride this wave with less risk and less capital long creating greater income is your host best-selling author and speaker Michelle Russell. I, this is Michelle, the master of money mindset, and you are listening to BNB dash boss podcast.
And in today's podcast, we're going to be talking with Arthur Cocker from stay fi. This is an amazing interview. This is the interview that I did for the cookie cutter BNB summit, because it got pushed back and all those things happened with Facebook, not allowing us to run our ads and stuff. What I decided to do was take the businesses and at least let everyone listen to the business interviews because they're really, really important.
And they can really help you build and grow your business. I mean, this is really important. What Arthur has to say is amazing because he's going to teach you how to collect emails, not just from the guys who are booking your rooms from every one around you. So take a listen. Hi Arthur. I'm Michelle. It's so nice to meet you.
And I'm really happy that we get to learn all about . Because most people, they don't, they only know about certain devices. Your device, I think is super special because you are nabbing, people's email addresses, and that is massively huge in the marketing department because most people don't realize. That you can move over to your own private website and, you know, make a lot more money, save a lot of money instead of paying Airbnb.
And VRVO by having your own website and marketing directly to your past guests. A lot of our guests in Florida have been coming year after year after year with us. And, you know, we've always been looking for a way to grab people's emails. Sometimes they blocked them on different platforms that we're on and we can't get them.
Tell me about how you came up with this. How did this, how did this whole thing evolve?
So my background is in marketing branding, especially digital and online. And I had a consulting business and I work with several large short term rental managers with, you know, 5,000 plus properties. And they had the same issue.
You just mentioned. They had five, 10, even 15 people stay in like six, eight bedroom homes. And if they were lucky, maybe they got one email from the Booker, but there's 10 other adults there who are all potential guests. So we were like, well, how can we collect information? That was the challenge, really?
And so we knew that in hotels, Starbucks, I'm sure you've seen it in airports. They use branded wifi splash pages. And so I actually just started. Let's find one of these people and put it in the vacation rentals, but they were super expensive. They were made for like hundreds of users, which isn't really applicable for a vacation home.
And they required a lot of it. Set up that I knew most people wouldn't be able to handle. So I was like, well, I'm sure I can just develop our own solution that works better. So we developed stay fi so that vacation rentals can deploy the same type of brand as splash pages, cheaply, affordably, and without any technical background to set up.
So that's kind of the Genesis of how we started two years ago,
incredibly inexpensive. You pay for you pay for the advice. And then if your first property is free, right,
you only have one property. You can pay. We have two devices, 89 or 1 0 9 that are the most commonly used. And then you're good to go. And then, like if you had 11 properties, it would be $55 a month.
If you have a hundred properties, it's like $400 a month. So it's pretty affordable. If it scales well as your business gets larger and larger. And I think the biggest sign of success that we see is that people that start with us with 2, 3, 4 properties, whenever they get a new property online and they're like, oh, we got to add stay five.
So like almost half of our orders are from existing customers because they see the value and they just want to keep adding it as they expand to new new properties.
Exactly and I mean, that repeat business. That's what you want. I mean, we have, like I said, years and years, people who come the same time with the same family members, because we have those large houses too.
So it's like, you know, grandma comes. Oh, all the kids and the grandkids are there and everybody comes every year. And you know, it's, I mean, it's great to keep that repeat business flowing and we've never been able to NAB those emails.
You see people book you again on Airbnb or BRBO. You know that like, oh, this should have been a direct booking.
Cause the first time you're getting somebody new and then you have to screen them and make sure they're a good guests. But then once you know their quality guests, you want them to come back and book direct and getting a direct booking website. So easy now. Like, I'm sure you've talked to plenty of PMs systems from all levels and price ranges.
All of them now have a director.
Alex even has, uh, Alex from sync BNB has a video walkthrough about how easy it is to build it. And they'll build you one for $600 if you don't want to do it. And you're like, it's super easy to do, but $600 or like take it.
Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, the great thing about, and I'll show you kind of like how it works on the backend, but, uh, you know, you create a splash page, takes a few minutes and then every single guest has to log in to access the wifi.
So they get introduced to your brand because if they booked an Airbnb, they. Don't know who you are like that you have a direct booking website, introduce yourself, get their name, email, even phone number, other information.
When you're going to get it on every single guest.
If you have 10 people on average, we'll get eight or nine adults, uh, emails during the whole stay.
So really supercharged your email list building, and then you can remarket to everyone, you know, their information, and then they know about your brand. And that direct booking is an option. And I'm sure in the past year, Airbnb. There are a lot of things that made people even want to get less dependent on them in the future.
Right. And just have more control over the business. And then the other thing that I mentioned to a lot of folks is yes, great to get all your bookers to come back. But also as you're trying to expand your portfolio of homes, you know, this is a unique advantage that other people aren't going to have is you can go to a homeowner and say, pick us as your property manager, because I have 10,000 guests emails.
Who are all reliable, great people that have stayed of those before. And they, they don't,
they, um, vacation rental, uh, Alliance thing.
Thank you. But just having like a big stable of guests, it's going to give you an advantage to attract more property owners. If you're doing traditional management to your property business.
Absolutely. Absolutely. I love that. Does the device, because we were wondering if you could put your device into a closet, it has to be hooked up to your internet router, right? So you take your router, you hook the device to your router. How do you keep people from fiddling with that?
Yeah, well, if they fiddle with it, they'll lose internet.
So that's yay
with the noise thing or the camera. They don't lose any benefit, but if they fit with this device, they're not going to have the internet. So that's definitely a detraction. And then a lot of people I recommend like if you have a utility closet, if the router is in the owner's closet or whatever happens to be, you know, lock the door because.
People like to MacGyver the internet system. And that's something that we want to avoid at all costs because you know, people just disconnect things and connected when they leave. Um, and then you can also in our portal, see who is, and whether the Internet's working or not.
Um, and all of that, that, because we, it, we have a challenge.
I mean, there's some, some of our E-box will tell us, but how do you know when your, your internet is out? How do you know when. You know, it's slowed down and something is up with it. You, your device actually lets us know exactly.
So it's like cloud, we call it cloud managed wifi. So you can have one property, a hundred properties from one screen, you can see they're online, it's all working.
You can actually see who's using the wifi, like all the guests, devices, their names. So you can like kind of just make sure. And then also alert. You have too many people are using the wifi so you can sell it.
Party's going on.
But I was going to say that, uh, the way that we've kind of have to think about it is when you plug in the device, it's broadcasting a new parallel guest network.
So if you've already gone through the trouble of camera's on your old wifi system TVs, you can leave it all. Running will stay on your home's password protected network. Don't have to touch the homeowner network. This stay fight device is just broadcasting a new guest network. And that's what you tell guests to join.
So you don't have to like fiddle with your existing setup. This is just a new network for just guests.
Okay. Perfect. Perfect. So possible. When the, when let's say a party is going on, how can you tell that a party is going on? Because a lot of people signed in or are they getting pings on it? And you can tell,
so we just count the number of unique users on the wifi over a certain window of time.
Okay. So if there's like you have a special to five of suddenly we see six unique individuals. So we don't count devices because someone like it's not uncommon to have six devices with one user. So we want to make sure we're counting unique users. And if it exceeds a certain number within a period of time, it will send an email alert and then you can actually log into the portal and see what the whatever number of devices are, whose they are.
Ah, that's pretty tricky. I love that. So it, it counts the individual users, which is perfect. I mean, you got into this with the email campaigning and marketing. So can you explain, because a lot of our hosts are new, they're new to business, they're new to everything. So, I mean, we've had a few businesses. Um, but people are like marketing.
Why do I need to market? What is marketing? Um, is it going shopping? And you're like, no, it's something you want to do. So can you kind of explain to us why we need to market? No, I'd say that. If you're looking to kind of take your short-term rental business to the next level, you need to develop your own brand identity.
Like why both do guests want to stay with you? And why do homeowners, if you're doing let's just typical one to entrust you with managing their properties. And really the brand is just. How people understand your business and what value you're offering. It's like why, when you go to the drug store, do you buy Tylenol and not generic set amount of feed, which is the exact same thing.
People are willing to pay $2 more for the brand. So the brand brings value for both the homeowners and the guests. And stay fast. We think the best way to introduce that brand to everyone, staying with you, collect their information and then remarket to them. Uh, which sounds scary, like email marketing, maybe you've never done it before.
What does that mean? We have like kind of step by step guides. When you sign up to kind of show you how to create your first campaign. With our kind of like preferred providers, how do you set up an email automation? So we kind of guide you through all the steps of how to take care of. That's really nice.
So if you're, if you've got like constant contact or MailChimp or something, you'll help set those up. I love that. Yeah. We know for a lot of people, this is all overwhelming and new. So like in MailChimp, it's super easy. Once you get it set up correctly, there's a bit of a learning curve, but great thing with a product like MailChimp is you can set up something called an automation.
So you make one welcome email and then maybe one follow-up email. And then every guest that you get through stay five gets the welcome email, gets the follow up email automatically. So you don't need to make a new email blast every month or every two weeks, you can just set up a few and they just go.
Automatically our messaging. Exactly. You don't need to the, like, it's not like, oh, I need to hire someone to make me new email templates every week. You can just set up a few and they just kind of go to everyone, staying in after they stay with you in your property. That's awesome. I love that. Um, what, what I, I, I was reading on your website, you had upcoming text messaging.
You're going to be able to do that. So right now you're able to collect phone numbers. Yeah. This idea came from some of our customers use like texts, marketing platforms. So they'll collect phone numbers and they'll shoot everyone like, Hey, you know, we have availability for July 4th or like it's the shoulder, shoulder season is what, you know, I feel like in a ski market, like those fall spring, maybe it's not as popular.
You know, you want to send everyone a deal by a text message, which has. You know, email open rates like 20, 30% pretty good text, open rates, 80, 90 plus percent. So we're going to build like our cause most people unlike email, where most people have a MailChimp or constant contact, most people don't have their own text marketing tool.
So we're going to build one into the state five platforms so you can send those types of marketing messages. Okay. Oh my gosh. That is amazing because that does have a much higher open rate. Yeah. And that would be, um, I can't wait till you get that up and running and then we touched on it for a second, but can you go into, um, the vacation rental Alliance that you have where you, because obviously you've been gathering emails from all your clients and obviously they stay at vacation rental properties.
So what have you, yeah, so this is totally opted. It's not like. You don't want to share your data in the Alliance. You don't have to. So it's like totally optional. Um, but if you do want to opt in, basically you create a listing on the website called the stays source. And on that website, it's kind of like, we think of it more like Yelp.
So everyone has a listing, but you don't book through the website. So if you, if someone finds you on that website, likes the reviews that they read, they can click on your listing and then open your direct booking site and then transact directly with you and ideas. If you participate all the emails, go into a shared pool.
Right now we have around 60,000 and then we'll send periodic email blasts. Talking about different rental managers, basically, if you want to participate. We'll help you get content on the site. And then, um, you know, just basically educate the idea really behind it is how do we educate the guests? The people that love vacation rentals that direct booking is the best way to book that's price, best service, best selection of homes.
Like a lot of companies don't put the best homes on Airbnb. They only put it on their own direct booking site. Cause I really want to trust them about the people that stay there. So it's really about educating guests about direct book and then also. Help them find property managers, because maybe you operate in Scottsdale or somewhere in Arizona.
And this way people can discover people that operate in another city. And then those people that stayed there can discover you in Scottsdale when they're looking to make a book in there. Fantastic. I love that. I mean, the more people, the better and sharing, I mean every, all the eyes on it, I mean, it'll just build your business faster and still within most people don't realize, but that's still a very limited market.
But, uh, uh, it would be a very hot market. I mean, these are these people, like you said, they've already purchased, they are already in there. So these are people more likely to rent from you. And they're not looking on a platform like Airbnb with thousands and thousands of listings. They're looking at a few select ones and I love that idea all professionally managed.
So, you know, not like someone rent a basement on the side, you know, we're looking to add partners that are. Professionalize their business, where it's really something that they focused on. So we know that whoever we recommend, that's going to be a good experience for the guests, because obviously to have that trust and face with the end consumer, they're going to have a good experience with the register.
All our LLCs have specific branding that goes along with it. So I I've always, it's, it's one of the first lessons. And even in our $7 course, we have these quick $7 courses to get people started. They're $7. I know that they're funny, but one of them even has like a whole big thing on branding. It's like, look.
Branding is super important. I worked for a guy named Robert Kiyosaki. He wrote a book called rich dad, poor dad, and his books are all purple and black and you should be able to spot your branding. He says going 60 miles an hour down a freeway. So was like when you go into a bookstore, if you see black and purple.
You're like, it's a rich dad book. It might, it might be one of the advisors, but it's definitely a rich dad book. You can, you can recognize. I mean, that's, what's interesting and like mature, more mature vacation with the mark. I was like, if you go to the golf coast of Florida, you see like all the vacation rental brands everywhere.
But then if you go to Austin, Texas, where there is vacation rentals everywhere, it's like, Even if you stay in one of the homes, you may not even know what the company was. They managed it. So you see the U S even like, depending on the market and how mature they are, like how advanced is the branding and you see it in more mature places.
The vacation rental brands are much more front and center because a lot of those businesses are 80% direct book or more. Oh, wow. So your brand can be anything. I mean, we have a desert breeze brand, so all our, you know, very deserty. And then we have obviously the island BNB brand, but, um, we have, uh, a young lady speaking with us and she has this awesome.
Um, Like vagabond dish kind of brand with trailer homes and stuff like that on, on these properties. And people can go in and rent them and it's so cool. And you're like, it's still branding, whatever you want to embrace. I mean, it can be the gypsy caravan brand or the. Camping brand, but the whole thing is you make it your own and you, you master it every one of your properties, like you can go in and they go, look, I know every time I go in there, it's going to be something like this.
And I love that in Texas. There's somebody I'm not even specifically. Sure. But I've like, Gone to stay there and I've gone through, and every time I'm drawn right to their places. And I can see it's the same owner, not very similar styles. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's just something that catches your eye every single time.
And you're just like, see that's branding. Yeah, because I noticed, especially some of the smaller managers who work with they have the strongest brand because they have like few houses, but they're so thick. And like, I know we work with a guy in Harley. I know his homes are like star wars themed, and it's like those strong.
And, but you know, like if your kids love star wars, like you're coming back to the star wars theme tests, because like, it is full on a hundred percent.
Yeah, he's got like a monopoly room and, uh, you know, the Stratego room and he's got like all these things. Exactly. People love those themes and it doesn't, you don't have to go crazy with it. But just having that branding is so important because it's just like, you know, when we were younger and we didn't stay at hotels, we would go to a Hilton or a Hyatt or a Marriott.
You stayed at specific ones because you knew, you know, and if you were going by a days, then you're like, Ooh, that's kind of iffy. You know? So you want your, your clients to feel the same way. They just feel safe when they stay with you. They know it's going to be clean. They know that's going to have the amenities.
That exactly, exactly that, that trust. Exactly and then builds it up and they know it. They trust it. They love it. Look, I can show you kind of love that. All right. So I do. Yeah. Yes. There's actually a real customer that we use for demos. So I'm not going to show the guest list with the actual guests names, but no worries.
Kind of explain generally how it works. Um, yeah. So when you log in to stay five, this is what the portal looks like. Um, and this gives you an, just a quick overview of kind of. What's online right now. And how many guests have used your internet over the last certain period of time? And this, uh, person operates three buildings and then that buildings, there are many units.
So there's like an Sr building and RS buildings. You see the different units here. Um, and how many folks have used the internet in the past? Let's say seven days. Or we can look at 30 days, you know, he's had 129 guests in the last 30 days across his properties. And I notice all right away, uh, whether he is renovating or things are not being used right now, but a few of them actually weren't online at this moment.
So when someone comes to say five, they typically first create a splash page, and this is what guests will use to log into the wifi. Just like you've been in an airport, Starbucks hotel in the past. And you can actually, we talked about it a little bit, but you can actually have a. Unique splash page for every property set of properties or one splash page for everything.
So if you have very like branded custom homes, you can actually make unique splash page for each property. So that it's like welcome to the guests to XYZ house and hope you enjoy your stay, all of those things. So he has a splash page for each of the different buildings that he operates. And when you create a splash page, this is what the builder looks like.
And so it's very simple. You just upload the logo. An image for the background. And then you can obviously set the text here and then the standard will be to collect first name, last name and email, but there are additional options to connect, to collect a phone number or a birth date, um, as well as choosing where you want to send guests after they log in.
So when guests logs in, they select the wifi network, they get the splash page and then once they connect, you can send them to any websites that you want. Typically, it's going to be the direct booking website that you have, but some people also have like a house manual or maybe they use like a touch stay host fully or Ruba roo guy, which are some common ones.
You can actually redirect guests to that home specific. Guests book or guests guide so they can learn more about the property because typically you only send those to the Booker through the channel they booked on. And this way you can actually send all the guests and the reservation to that guest book when they log into the wifi.
I love that. Yeah. So once you create a splash page, you just set up your properties in the system. And so you can group the properties. Like I mentioned, this individual house. Three buildings. So you can see here, here is like silver rock. And then these are all the individual condo units within silver rock.
And you actually can see here, someone has unplugged the wifi in this unit because I can actually see, they have one device stay five device, but it's not online right now. And then here's also where you can set a threshold for, uh, occupancy. So. Uh, when you create a property, have the ability to set an occupancy threshold and then determine who is going to get the email, if that's ever exceeded, uh, while people are in the unit, um, all the guests are going to get added to the guest list, but I'm just not going to go there cause you'll see all the guests information.
Um, and then I mentioned before all the different types of integration, so MailChimp by far the most popular in vacation rental world. But there's a bunch of other ones that people use. So if you use one already, you probably have it covered. And then there are also some other like CRMs and PMs is that you can, um, connect with dissent data there as well as we have some integrations with these digital guidebooks, for those kinds of redirects.
I mentioned in some deals, if you want to try these in the platform itself, so you can like try these products for free. If you sign up for stay fi. Yeah. Um, and then, uh, I mentioned kind of like the wifi monitoring. So when you actually go to access points, so these are the actual wifi devices. You can see, uh, you know, if you can actually look and find, this is the one that we know is disconnected and not online.
So he knows that when it's turnover time, uh, someone checks this and they know when I go to this unit to make sure that it's plugged in and working as been unplugged or the internet, sometimes guests. Just unplug the whole internet or turn the power off. I showed you seen all these things before, but this way, you know, it's something to look for when you actually go to the property.
Cause he knows not online right now. But the nice thing is if guests stayed here, they probably wouldn't know the internet is offline. And the reason is, um, all the devices share the same. We call it an SSI ID, but it's basically the guest network name is the same. And since they're all in one building, if the guest is in that unit, they'll see this network from access points and surrounding units.
And they can actually still log on. And once you log on your device will actually work in the whole building. So it'd be like a hotel. So the way it's set up is once you log on your device works across all the access points. So even in this situation, if someone checked into this unit, they probably would still be able to use the internet just fine and not even notice that it's offline.
So that's one of the nice things about using our product and multi-family is that it's works as one shared internet system for the entire building, just like a hotel. Then you could have maybe, um, let's say you have a device, like an echo or a Google, and you're using like a virtual concierge or something in there.
So your virtual concierge, that unit could be hooked up to another part of the internet. And then you're, when anybody goes to sign it, it's going to be a guest part is what you're saying. Is that, what is that? What I'm hearing? Even if you take those. Device and you sign on to this. So there's two networks here.
There's a guest network, which gives you the splash page. And there's an admin network with a traditional password. Do you take like a noise aware or a other device and you sign on this admin network, your device or TV will work in all you all homes with stay five. So he joined the network. It works in every location with stay five.
So they only have to join once. And then it will work in all of your vacation rentals across the board, even if one guests. So some folks, they like maybe they rent two homes that are next to each other. This way guests will get in one home, walk up to the other home device, still online. And then in a multifamily where let's say you have two condos next to each other, maybe four, even you can.
Cut down to one internet subscription and then create like a mash using our devices. So you can also reduce your internet expenditure if you manage multiple units next to each other, as long as so, yeah, that's pretty cool. And there's like a lot outside of the email collection on the wifi management side, there's all sorts of fun things you can do, uh, to kind of like.
Reduce internet costs and just improve the overall experience for guests, because they're getting like that same building wide experience where it's going to work and share it spaces or at the pool nearby and have like one login for all your, I saw you had an outdoor mesh, so you could do the pool area.
Yeah. So when you go to the, this is our like store with the access points. So nice as we configure everything. Before we shift them. So we'll like configure it to your account, set up the device. So when you get the device, all you have to do is plug it in to the router. And then we do sell this cute little device with these ears that can actually like be attached to like a pole or a, to a wall outside.
And it can be rained snowed on ice, Don. Uh, and we'll extend the signal and outdoor places. So we have folks, you know, with these big eight story homes, I mean eight bedroom homes in Texas that have huge pools and maybe they're on a lake and it's like a boat house. You could put one of these somewhere in the middle and it will give you that complete outdoor coverage, uh, that you want.
And that is kind of like really nice, uh, Oh, I love that. It's definitely, definitely in those locations. So, and then guess one internet by the pool. Um, and we've even done some like a shared pools so that I have like a community and maybe they have internet by the pool. You can set one of these up and then you go grab everyone's email.
Is that the, the pool,
even though we're like made, like we. Market. And they're only used really in vacation rentals. If there's other locations where you have internet and you want to provide a guest login, there's no reason why you can't also use it there. Perfect. I love that. So the, I mean, I love the multiple use of this because a lot of times there's, you know, one trick ponies and it's like, oh, that's nice.
It would be nice to have that one thing, you know? Cause it just does one thing. Um, uh, collecting the emails is great. It's like, wait, collecting the emails and making sure that you got the number of guests. That's like excellent. Uh, being able to take and do your marketing from there. Uh, even more excellent and now sharing to an entire network of people.
Even more, it just gets better and better. So I'd love, I love that. It's not just a one trick pony. That there's way more applications to your business. Yeah. Cool. I love that too. Cause I'm sitting here thinking why there's a, a few places, a few condos that we own that, um, I'm like we can put that into bull hearing.
Grab everybody it's up. Everybody would be using there's some, because there's other BnBs. There's like. And then how did you mark it to our guys? Well, they were on our email list. We've had some cases where people put it in multi-family and then other owners were like, Hey, maybe we should, these people seem to be more ahead of the curve with marketing new should talk to them about managing our property because they have this.
So, uh, tons of ways to help you get noticed by all sorts of folks. Perfect. Perfect. I love that. Okay. And so, I mean everything there, I mean, it's super easy. It's very, it's very user-friendly too. So nothing's secretive and I love the fact that you could scan easily and see that it's connected, connected, connected, and, um, which one is disconnected.
So you would get an email, how long before you get that email so that you can act upon that, that somebody. Yeah. So it's, it's, we're, we're like, this is we're relaunching this cause this is a great question. So it used to be, it was just like if a disconnected with trigger and alert, but then it would be disconnected for two minutes and we don't want to alert you.
So it will be rereleased hopefully next month where you will say, oh, you can set it yourself. We're doing it. Hopefully in, uh, I think we are scheduled for June where you'll be able to be like, I want to be alerted if the internet is out for blank minutes, and these are whose emails should be alerted. So that's how we're going to redo it when we relaunch it.
Because just getting alert when it's. The one thing that I've learned through this business is a lot of locations have a lot of internet out of shoes. I looked at Tucson is infamous for that Orleans. It's like over the course of 24 hours. It's like five minutes out, 10 minutes out, 10 minutes out, three minutes out, five minutes out.
So depending on your city, your ISP. It's some places I look never out. Never need to reset the modem. I don't know why, like Savannah, Georgia, I've seen homes. They're never an issue in new Orleans. You think kind of similar, but not similar at all when it comes to the internet quality. So we're like, instead of making a one size fits all, we should just give the property manager the power to know like, Also if it's 30 minutes, then tell me, cause then I know it's like a real issue and not just like a five minute outage because internet provider just went down a little bit.
So we kind of re-imagined it. So that give you the control to set the alerts for what matters for your business. Yeah, that that's perfect. Because like you said, you would know. And if your area, if you set it at five minutes and you were getting a notification all the time, you would set it further out and then somebody else, like, you know, like here in Phoenix or our properties in Orlando or Kissimmee or, um, Davenport vape, They don't get outages.
So we would want to know right away. It's like, okay, something's up? That's the one thing I've learned. Every ISP location, us different one cool thing that's coming that we seen in Northern Canada is start it Starlink, which is like satellite based internet. Just like 300 plus mags. That's like being beta being rolled out.
So if you, I hear you're a property manager. I think they also have in the Southern hemisphere, like in Tasmania. So if you operate in those markets, definitely check out the Starling. Cause that's going to be like a. Awesome to the traditional. I know I live in New York city, so no car from me, but if I do get a car, definitely gonna be Tesla.
Tesla, me too. Me too. I got the battery all set up. Right? You can mean solar power. Probably. You can charge that up so quickly. Maybe we can link all together. I love this. I love the idea of having all this and gathering all the email and our marketing and stuff and being able to market right to ourselves.
When I was talking to Alex about sync bandy event, he was saying that within two to three years, some properties are between 80 and 90%. You know, self-reliance on their own. On their own reservation systems. Yeah. So, I mean, you could, you could literally not be paying Airbnb at all. Yeah. And you have your own set, your own rules for your reservations and your own cancer policy.
And nobody can come in and override them, uh, whenever they want. So, you know, definitely gives you the power and then. It's better for guests too, because of a lot of those things on the like, even booking.com it's even a larger fee, but sometimes they put other fees on the guests too. So, I mean exactly on the other end that you don't see.
So yeah, absolutely. It saves them a lot of money and the love that I love that. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to, to show everybody this. Do you have anything in the works that you, uh, you know, we, we touched on the fact that you're going to be doing the, um, Text messaging, which is fantastic because you're right.
They open the majority of your text messages because it's just a click. It's like, well, what do they got going on? Oh, okay. And they'll, their eyes will be on it for even a moment. So I love that idea. But anything else that you've got new in and growing there? Well, we have like a few, like a lot of our ideas come from our customers.
So this is like a little thing, but I'll just preview it. So there's just like the occupancy alert came from a customer. One of our customers was like, you know, everyone is so much more custom using QR codes. Now, why don't we just do a QR code for the wifi? So I was like, that's a really, that's a good idea.
So we're actually going to make it so you can order we'll either print or order a QR code that works for all your wifi. So you can get a magnet or put on a counter. So guests can just scan the QR code and the slash page will appear right on their device. So that way getting live into the guests even easier.
Oh, I love that feature. Yeah, because we're all used to the QR codes because of the, um, the menus and stuff from like now everybody. Yeah, exactly. No one, no one's going to pay for menus anymore. Now we feel sorry for the menu people. Right. So that's actually, you know, because then. You know, guests can get on, they don't even have to know the name of the network.
They can literally just go there, scan it, get on the wifi and then be good to go. So it's all, you know, just adding those little like delightful features that make the product more interactive and like interesting to use and better for guests and over their overall experience. It definitely thinks we, we keep adding and all of our customers, you know, We launched the occupancy alert in like two weeks when somebody told us they wanted that.
So we're really, yeah, you got on it and you made it happen. Holy cow, like, this is great that when I was talking to him and I said, oh, you know, you should work with say, and he goes, he goes, oh my gosh. I just, I was like, I'm like, oh, see, I'm telling you all these, all of these businesses together, just hand in hand, they work so well together.
Um, you know, chocolate and peanut butter. Right.
I love that. Well, thanks so much for your time, Arthur. I really do. I really appreciate it were fun. Yeah. I enjoyed this a lot. Yeah. I'm gonna make sure that you get a link, everybody to, um, you'll get a link to stay. Fi if you only have one property right now. That's really cool because you get to, you get to use that for free.
If your properties are close, I hope you understood. What Arthur was saying is you can share the platform between your properties if they're close enough. So there's a lot of ways to save money and the technology is super, super easy. I'm sure the setup is it's pretty easy for that page anyway, right? Can you take it, you could probably take a picture of your properties, one of your favorite pictures and put it on there too, right?
Yeah. And you don't need a logo, you know, the logo. And I was going to say like, branding, like, you don't have any, like, you can hire it like as a platform, like Upwork or Fiverr, and you can get an, a brand identity for 50 bucks, a hundred bucks, like a logo, colors, font that you should use. So all those things now that used to have to pay like thousands for, for a website or for collaterals, everything is so much, you know, Easier and cheaper now to just find somebody around the world that can help you do that for super inexpensive five bucks.
When you go to Fiverr for five bucks or CAMBA, just go ahead and Canva it's like camper. You can pick your colors and logos and playing around. Super easy. Now I love the, I love that. I love that. And I love that you were into the marketing part and the branding part before that branding is so such an important part.
We want to make sure that, you know, everybody's got their business together and that's going to be a part of duplication process. Um, and, and just like Arthur was saying too, can you repeat what you were saying? How people will start with one property and you see them grow how easily they can. You know, just duplicate this process.
You're just plugging them in. You have your set up process, whatever it is, you maybe have a door lock thing and then you have stay fine. You have a noise aware, you know, you kind of build that structure and then you just. Get a new homeowner and be like, this is the stuff that we installed. Sometimes they pay for it, you pay it.
I mean, the business models can be a little different, but it's just like, then you just repeat and then you repeat again. And then your list of contacts just grows and grows and grows. And then you go to the next one and say, well, now we have 10,000 guests in our database. Like we're definitely the best property manager in the area.
And then you can just keep scaling your business and your cost per units are going down as you start scaling and adding more properties to your program. That's awesome. I love that. Thank you so much for sharing all this information for everybody. This is a great way for everybody to collect that data and grow.
And, um, I appreciate your time too, and you look great that you're back from Hawaii. You know, you're not as tan as you should be fading in it. Neat. Little grain cloudy, but sunny today. So I'm going to get outside soon. That's good. Yeah. I heard you guys are opening up in New York, finally. Yeah. And, um, I think they said in two weeks, it will be like right now, I'd say it's like 75%.
Um, but I think in two weeks we go to complete a hundred percent, which is just in time for spring and summer. So, I mean, I think it's going to get a little wild here because people are, people have been locked up, but anyway, they call them stir crazy. It's going to be like, it's going to be like the wild west shooting.
Boom, boom. I think again, which is like one downside. I was used to zipping around New York with like, no buddy, no car fast. And I'm like, oh, this traffic, I see tourists. It's crazy. When we go to Florida, tried that we, we went back to our property and we hadn't been there in months and months and the population is booming.
We couldn't believe the amount of. Buildings houses being built. And they're like, oh right now this many hundreds of thousands of people are moving in. And these many people, and we're like, what the heck? There's a lot of new Yorkers going down, moving into Florida. The population is just growing and our properties are all worth more and more and more sort of like, thank you.
Thank you. New York. Thank you for increasing the values of our properties. We do appreciate that. All right. Well, you have a good one, hun. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed it, Arthur. I mean, he was knowledgeable and funny and I love the fact that he was into marketing way before any of this other stuff.
So that helps a lot, most people, especially if you've never been in another business and you've just got into investing or you got into BnB's haphazardly, you know, not thinking about it as being a career or a business. You've never realized how important it is to collect those emails, to build your list and to create your own website so that you can save all that money and market directly to the people that have booked with you before it's going to save you a lot of money.
And then if you wanted to, I mean, just getting in on his system and having tens of thousands of emails and being in front of all those people, just sharing your list with them and their list with you. That's an even better way because you're going to grow that list that much faster. So make sure you check out, stay five.
It's an amazing product. We will have all the links right inside this episodes information so that you can just click and get right over to stay five and pick up your first one, practically for free. I just wanted to let you know that we had, not only did we get hacked. I mean, we just had a heck of a couple of months.
I don't know what is going on, but finally we got back on Facebook. So we're going to be able to place our ads, which is great news. So I'm super excited about that. We're just going to push it back until July. And we'll have that out for you, but I'm going to play every week for the next few weeks. I'm going to give you some really great information from those businesses, because I don't want those specials to wear out.
And I want the information to be fresh and for you to get it in a timely manner. So I'm going to be pushing those out to you, but we also had our email servers go down with GoDaddy. Luckily. Someone was trying to get a hold of me and Olga, our VA from the Philippines contacted me and said, check your email.
And I went in there and I was like, I haven't gotten anything may like, I forget what it was, May 28th or something. Do me a favor. If you have sent in your view and you took a picture of it and you sent it to me. We're going to give all of you all a t-shirt because we can't find anybody's email except for a couple of people that we already had that one.
So I've reached out to a couple of people letting them know that they've won already. And we're going to put everybody back in there. Anybody who's left a review from today backwards. We're going to give you guys a t-shirt. So we're going to be like Oprah. You get a t-shirt and you get a t-shirt and you get a t-shirt.
And we're going to make sure that from now on, everything is working. And so hopefully this'll be it. I mean, the summit will be up and running again. The website is up and running and safe and everything. We're going to be able to take the summit and market it. So you'll see ads out there and we'll be able to get that going for July and yay.
It's all looking up. So I'm really excited that we're going to get this all together and get this on my going boy, I can't tell you just what a weight that was off of my shoulders. And again, I wanted to thank you. If you were one of the people who have left us a review. If you have a subscribed, we really, really appreciate it.
And if you can do that, that would help us out so much tremendously with getting sponsors. Um, Friday, we're going to start our ABCs of acquisitions, and I think you'll really like that series. It is the replay from short term rental revenue, and that'll be every Friday and next week, Monday. We are going to have Alex from sync BNB.
And if you don't know what sync BNB is, you are missing out. They are an amazing, amazing company with amazing services. You can literally wink any calendar from anywhere together using sync BNB. I mean, it's just phenomenal. So make sure you tune in next Monday. So you can hear Alex from sync, BNB and have a great week.
Thank you so much for listening. God bless you. Go and grow.
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