New marketplace Comparable connects homeowners with STR managers (Ep 603)

In this episode of “Get Paid For Your Pad,” I had the pleasure of chatting with Brooke Pfautz, the founder of Ventori and Comparent, a vacation rental management platform. We delved into some exciting topics, so let's get started.

Brooke kicked things off by discussing his book, “Vacation Rental Secrets,” which is packed with insights from industry experts. One common theme throughout the book is the importance of avoiding quick fixes when facing challenges. Brooke emphasized that mistakes often arise from the desire to find a quick solution instead of the right one.

One major challenge discussed was hiring the right talent for vacation rental management. Brooke stressed the significance of vetting potential hires upfront and using tools like predictive personality assessments from predictiveindex.com. These tools reveal the true personality of candidates, not just their interview personas, helping in making the right hiring choices.

We also dived into Brooke's latest venture, Comparent, a platform connecting vacation rental homeowners with professional vacation rental managers. Comparent aims to provide transparency and help homeowners make informed decisions about property management. Property managers can claim their listings for free, and in the future, it will serve as a valuable resource for property managers and homeowners alike.

During our conversation, Brooke highlighted the potential for property managers to use Comparent to demonstrate their credibility to homeowners. By showcasing their high ratings and reviews, property managers can gain an edge in a competitive market.

Brooke's passion for elevating the vacation rental industry is evident, and Comparent is poised to be a game-changer. If you're in the vacation rental management business, it's worth exploring the platform at www.comparent.com/

Jasper Ribbers (00:00.627)
What's up everybody. Welcome back to Get Paid for Your Pad. And today I have a repeat guest, Mr. Brook Fouts. He is the CEO and founder of Vintry and ComParent. And ComParent is his newest venture. It's an online marketplace that connects professional vacation rental managers with homeowners. Something that's pretty new in our industry. So I'm excited to talk about that, Brook. Welcome to the show.

Brooke Pfautz (00:26.882)
Jasper, thanks for having me on again, man. Appreciate it.

Jasper Ribbers (00:29.651)
Yeah, absolutely. So you recently published a book. And if you're listening to this, you haven't heard about it, do check it out, The Facation Rental Secrets, the Short-Term Rental Industry's Top Experts to Close Their Biggest Mistakes and Share Their Hard-Earned Wisdom. I've read through about half of the book or so. Very interesting to see the mistakes that people have made. There's a lot of.

A lot of, um, little similarities, like it's kind of the same type of mistakes that kind of the challenges that pop up in everybody's business. Um, but yeah, before we dive into a comparent, um, wouldn't you give us a little bit of a background on this book? Like why did you write it? And, uh, what's, uh, yeah, let's give us a bit, a bit of background.

Brooke Pfautz (01:16.306)
Yeah, so I had no intention of writing a book. It literally started with a post on LinkedIn. So it was Easter Sunday this past year and the extended family all just left. I poured myself a big glass of wine, sat down and just opened up my phone. And I saw a post from a gentleman in a completely different industry talking about, sharing your top 10 mistakes. And I was like, what a great concept that was. And the reason I liked it was two things. The first is,

There's something about seeing really successful people about being vulnerable. And then the second part of it was you really learn from your mistakes. So I shot a quick email off to four friends that were in the industry. And Ryan Dame with Kasego responded back almost immediately with his top 10 mistakes. So the next morning I posted it on LinkedIn and it went viral. Jasper, it was unbelievable. I mean, the response from this was fantastic.

And then the other three people that I sent it to, they responded and I posted those. And I just noticed this theme and I just saw how well this resonated. So I said, you know what, let me continue to do this. I had literally people reaching out to me that I'd never met before, that were reaching out and sharing their top 10 mistakes. So for 52 days straight, every single day at 6 a.m., I posted another leader's mistakes. And that was it, that was kind of the beginning of it. And like I said,

Never had any intention of making a book, but I ended up going to a conference and I bumped into this gentleman. He actually came up to me. He said, hey, you don't know me. I just want to introduce myself. I want to thank you for the series. And I wanted to let you know that I actually print out every single one of these mistakes. And I put them in a three ring binder. And I'm like, so you're kind of making a book, right? And he goes, yeah, exactly. I was like, well, maybe I need to turn all this content into something more. So luckily I…

I had a little bit of experience publishing a book. I published from zero to 500 properties in five years earlier. So I went through that whole rabbit hole of doing it through Kindle Direct Publishing, which is a great platform, by the way, for anyone looking to publish a book. And we published it. And again, it's just been unbelievable. It was a bestseller, I think, in three categories. It's been, I think, the first week we had over 3,000.

Brooke Pfautz (03:36.138)
purchases of the book. So it just, yeah, it's been absolutely fantastic and absolutely love it. And yeah, that's how we got a book out of this. And like I said, no intentions of turning into a book. Yeah. And it was funny. So from the day the first post happened till the sample book was in my hands was three and a half months. It was crazy. I mean, to give you an idea, I mean, I think the first book, it took well over a year to do that same.

Jasper Ribbers (03:46.939)
Those are the best books when you don't intend to write it.

Jasper Ribbers (03:59.7)
Wow.

Jasper Ribbers (04:04.571)
Yeah. Wow. Yeah, that's impressive. And it's funny because when I wrote my book, Get Paid for Your Pad, it was kind of a similar story because I initially also didn't intend to publish it. It was more like my own notes. I was just like gathering notes from the internet because 10 years ago, it was hard to find any info. And eventually, I let one of my friends read it. And that person was like, oh, you should turn this into a book. So…

Brooke Pfautz (04:31.15)
That's great.

Jasper Ribbers (04:32.571)
Awesome. So that's, yeah, I would love to, I mean, there's so many, there's so much value in this book. There's, you know, there's so many important takeaways. Um, and there's no way we can cover all of that in this, on this podcast, right? But, um, if I ask you what, what do you, what do you think are like the, the free, the free biggest takeaways that you got from, from going through this process?

Brooke Pfautz (04:53.982)
Yeah, so just to back up a step, the organization of the book, just to give everybody an idea, it's two sections. So the first section is everybody's top 10 mistakes. So listed exactly the way they listed it, spelling errors and everything. And the second section, what we realized was they bucketed nicely. It was funny. Out of 52 people, 520 mistakes, they all bucketed neatly into like 10 categories.

And each one of this, the second part of the book is the 10 chapters of how they kind of organize. So kind of set the framework there. So I think the things that really kind of jumped out at me was at first, we all made the same freaking mistakes. It's like everybody, even the most successful people. I mean, people like Jason Sprinkle, who sold 360 Blue for a ton of money, Steve Schwab and Ryan Dayne with Cossago with over 4,000 properties under management. Like…

Jasper Ribbers (05:35.928)
Yeah

Brooke Pfautz (05:46.954)
some of the most successful companies you've ever seen, we all made the same mistake. So it was kind of, it was, I guess, humbling to see that, you know, and reassuring that we all, you know, I thought I was the only one that made some of these mistakes, but it seems that everybody made them. So that would be the first thing. But just as far as like some of the categories, you know, team was a big one. Like just like, like how important building out a really good team it is, how important it is to hire the right people. And also conversely, like,

Don't be too afraid to fire people. Steve Trover called it the 36 hours of suck. It sucks for 36 hours, but you know in your heart when you gotta get rid of somebody. Talking about just also nurturing and delegating. So many people that build these vacational management companies are high achieving, overachievers, where they are afraid to delegate and they just keep too many things on their plate. So that was a big mistake that everybody made. But just looking at some other different categories.

Inventory acquisition, you know, shameless plug here for Vintory obviously was a big one, like not being intentional about it, not putting, setting aside a certain part of your revenue dedicated towards owner acquisition. Almost every one of these companies obviously has a very big marketing budget on getting guests, but very, very few companies have any kind of budget getting new inventory or new properties. And that is obviously the biggest lever, you know, that you can pull to have the greatest impact.

And also taking on the wrong properties. A lot of people made that mistake, you know, and then going from going into, you know, taking on the wrong owners too, and not being afraid to fire owners, especially those toxic ones that are really just adding some stress to your, to your team for sure.

Jasper Ribbers (07:17.336)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper Ribbers (07:33.051)
Yeah, it's funny. I actually just got off a call with our Latinx students and there was one particular person who was literally going through this right now. And it's funny because I, yeah, it's funny because

Brooke Pfautz (07:43.998)
We all go through it.

Jasper Ribbers (07:49.503)
This, this person said like, Hey, I have this owner. This is what happened. This is what, you know, this is the feedback I'm getting. This is the friction that I'm running into with this person. Essentially like looking over my shoulder, uh, doesn't want to work the way at I work has, you know, feedback on everything I do. Um, and it's a, it's funny because as they're sharing it, like they're already, they're, they're answering their own question already, right? The question is like, what should I do with this owner? And after fencing for 10 minutes, I'm like,

Brooke Pfautz (08:12.238)
Yeah

Jasper Ribbers (08:17.073)
I think you know what to do.

Brooke Pfautz (08:19.274)
Well, so Jody Taylor-Refasco with TaylorMade out in Deep Creek, she sold her company out in Deep Creek for a ton of money to VTrips. But one of the quotes she said about this was, don't wait too long to fire an owner. If you're feeling frustrated with them, so are your employees. If anyone is badgering your staff and has unrealistic expectations, cut them loose. You are better off and they may be too.

Jasper Ribbers (08:44.415)
Right. Yeah, and it's funny because I suggested to a student like, hey, maybe you can recommend your biggest competitor to that client. And then he said, well, that's all I got. That's all I got.

Brooke Pfautz (08:51.874)
Yeah, exactly.

Brooke Pfautz (08:58.338)
She's just going to go all the way around. That's one of the questions I always used to ask when I would meet with a new owner. I was like, well, who have you been with? When they start listing three different companies in the last couple of years, you know what? You might be better off just kind of passing.

Jasper Ribbers (09:00.407)
Heh.

Jasper Ribbers (09:13.879)
Yeah, power of saying no. Awesome. So you mentioned team and something you mentioned, I actually interviewed Steve a couple weeks ago, Steve Trover of Better Talent and he had another interesting expression. He was saying the fogger mirror strategy, like hire, if you can fog a mirror, you're hired. That's…

Brooke Pfautz (09:36.514)
You're hired, yep. That's not a good one. That would be a mistake, you know?

Jasper Ribbers (09:41.751)
Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that's something that I think we're probably all guilty of as entrepreneurs, right? And, you know, isn't it interesting that we all make the same mistakes, right? Is that just a process that every entrepreneur has to go through? Is there a number of lessons that just the only way to really learn them is to actually go through the experience?

Brooke Pfautz (09:49.787)
Yeah.

Brooke Pfautz (10:05.302)
Well, look, I mean, there isn't a class, I mean, other than the masterminds you do, there really isn't like a class on this. There isn't like a Cornell, like hospitality school of vacation rentals. We all just had to have to stumble through it. And that's why, again, not a shameless plug for the book, but that's why I think this book is so valuable. Like this is, again, 52 of the top leaders sharing their mistakes. Like, I mean, and so many people have told me, they're like, I wish I would have had this book.

when I was launching my company, I would have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars. And I mean, for 15 bucks or whatever it is on Amazon, you can get one for 4.99 on Kindle. I mean, it's well worth it. And for the record, just to make this clear, I don't make one dime off this. All proceeds go to short-term rental advocacy efforts. So go out, buy the book. It'll save you a ton of money in the end. But I mean, yeah, there's never been a resource like this out there. And I think we all just have to kind of go through it. And so often it's-

A lot of these things are counterintuitive, so you wouldn't realize it unless you actually have to go through that pain. But look, here's the manual right here. Read the book and you'll save yourself a lot of heartache and a lot of money for sure.

Jasper Ribbers (11:06.652)
Yeah.

Jasper Ribbers (11:14.951)
I feel like one common denominator throughout the book as well is like the mistakes that we make are typically like finding a quick solution for a challenge that we're experiencing versus finding the right solution, if that makes sense, right? It's… Yeah.

Brooke Pfautz (11:34.67)
Yeah. Well, hiring is a perfect example of that. You know, so often it's like you just hire the first person, going back to what Steve said, you know, fogging a mirror. When you really, it's like, if you think about how, how detrimental one bad hire is, um, and if you can, you know, do a little bit of that vetting in advance and taking advantage, one of the, the second thing that came up on our team was using, not using personality assessments like predictive index, which is a service that Steve does.

Jasper Ribbers (12:00.253)
Mm-hmm.

Brooke Pfautz (12:03.85)
a better talent, those predictive index, those psychometric personality assessment tools, you get to see under the hood who that person really is. Not who they interview, not who they even show up on day one, but who is going to be there each and every day. That was a huge mistake that a lot of people mentioned and that does it. But yeah, it's that quick fix. But if you spend a little bit of time on the upfront, especially on the hiring process, it'll save you a lot of heartache on the…

Jasper Ribbers (12:26.197)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper Ribbers (12:33.359)
Yeah, it's a great resource, predictiveindex.com. It's essentially, it's a personality test. It only takes like five minutes. We actually did it live with, with Steve and our mastermind a couple weeks ago, which was really fun. It's very insightful. It's very insightful to. I do. Yeah. I'm a collaborator.

Brooke Pfautz (12:42.718)
Oh, cool. It's nice.

What was your profile? Do you remember your profile?

Brooke Pfautz (12:52.878)
It's nice. I love it. Yeah, yeah.

Jasper Ribbers (12:55.787)
Yeah, so there's a total of 17 different profiles. So if you're listening to this, if you're curious to know what your profile is, go to predictiveindex.com and you'll be able to find out. But it's also very insightful to understand that when you don't have experience with hiring, you're very focused on the tasks. What kind of tasks does this person need to complete? What experience? What skill sets?

But you don't really think about personality. And a point that Steve brought up was that we tend to hire the people that we like, not necessarily the people that have the right personality for the role.

Brooke Pfautz (13:29.71)
Truth.

Brooke Pfautz (13:33.266)
Yeah. And also, very often we hire people based on experience, and I know this sounds counterintuitive, when experience may not necessarily be what you need. I mean, I'd much rather hire somebody that has the skill set and the natural organic ability to do things overall that we can teach than somebody that maybe has the wrong profile but has a little bit of experience doing it. Now, I mean, we're not talking brain surgery, we're not talking architecture and engineering. I mean, we're talking about vacation rentals.

Jasper Ribbers (14:00.287)
Mm-hmm.

Brooke Pfautz (14:02.494)
If you have some, if you're the right profile and you have some general intelligence, like we can figure this out and they can learn it. So I would much rather hire the person based on that personality profile than actually the, you know, kind of the suitcase or the briefcase that they're bringing with them and the experience.

Jasper Ribbers (14:20.679)
Awesome. So vacation rental secrets. You can find it on Amazon. Definitely worth a read. Let's talk about Comparrent. That's a company that you recently launched. I know you're very excited about this. So why don't you give us a quick background of why did you start this company?

Brooke Pfautz (14:40.086)
Yeah, so, well, first off, I've had this idea for probably close to a decade and just, you know, things always got in the way and obviously Venturi ended up starting taking off. And also we just, we also didn't have all the data, but yeah, so comparing it on a very high level, it's a marketplace connecting vacation rental homeowners and professional vacation rental management. And if you think about it, if you're a homeowner right now, so let's just say your brother or sister or something like that were to buy a vacation home.

Like you and I could help them kind of guide them on probably choosing a great professional manager. We have the resources, we can do some research, we can make some phone calls. But if you're an average consumer out there, there isn't any kind of website, there isn't any kind of resource that is transparent, that shows you like kind of how that company does. So that was kind of the original thesis behind Comparant was really to give the Hays

Brooke Pfautz (15:36.03)
And on the other side of it, if you're a professional vacation rental manager, there has never been a channel that you could go to. There's never been like an OTA, the Airbnb or Virbo, if you will, to get more homeowner leads. You had to do it with referrals, like building out referral network with realtors. You had to send a ton of direct mail. You had to do a bunch of email marketing. You had to do all these things, all these things that Ventory does, which again, we do a fantastic job, but it is a lot of brain damage to put all those, we've helped over 700 different companies.

Jasper Ribbers (15:53.751)
Mm-hmm.

Brooke Pfautz (16:05.774)
And there's a lot of work to get all that marketing, and it takes time. So we figured, you know what? It'd be so much more efficient if we built a website, this marketplace that allowed to connect these two. And that's exactly what we did. And at launch, Jasper, we have over 5,000 professional Vagational Managers live on the website. We have their reviews from Airbnb, from Verbo, from Google My Business. We have all their metrics.

This has never been done before. There's never been a website that has all this information on one website. And again, it is 100% for free for the H.E.S.T.R.O.L.D. managers to use. You can go in there, you can claim your listing, you can start gathering homeowner reviews, and we will always have that free option. Now, I am a capitalist. I love money, I love businesses. Eventually we'll figure out how to monetize this, and I'm sure we'll have some bells and whistles and stuff like that you can upgrade on there, but we will always have a free version where you can get leads.

for free and you can start gathering homeowner reviews. But again, the original thesis was just to really to shine a light and have some transparency on the wonderful world of short-term rentals and that professional management. And if you think about it, a lot of this was sparked, there was a funny, we have one of our partners, a guy named Steven, he was an Air Force pilot and he came to one of my, we did at Verma last year, he came to one of my sessions, a bootcamp session.

and he had one property, his personal property in Myrtle Beach, Delaware. Well, over the last year, he's grown to 52 properties. So, I mean, he's done fantastic. If you look at his reviews on Airbnb and Virbo and even Google My Business, he has 4.9 stars on every single category. And this guy, he's getting like 20% more per rental than all of his competitors. He's killing it, but he's brand new. Nobody's ever heard of this kid. But now he's on Comparent. He actually can go side by side against these large venture-backed conglomerates.

you know, the evolves and the Vacasas and the V-trips, he can go side by side with them and his stats are considerably better. So in my mind, it really levels the playing field for a lot of these smaller, newer companies that do a really good job. And look, I'm sure there's gonna be some companies out there that hate me, that don't like me, but all I'm doing is I'm shining a light on their metrics, their numbers. We're not making up anything, we're not putting in our own information, we're literally just kind of taking all that information that's already out there.

Jasper Ribbers (18:21.763)
Mm-hmm.

Brooke Pfautz (18:30.25)
and just shining a light on it. At one point we thought about our logo was gonna be a spotlight, because that's exactly what we do. We shine a light in kind of those dark corners. What do they say? Sunlight is the ultimate disinfectant, you know?

Jasper Ribbers (18:43.618)
Yeah, and hopefully this will be an inspiration for the companies that don't have high review ratings to set the standard a little higher, right? Because…

Brooke Pfautz (18:52.642)
Yes. It's going to elevate the entire industry. Look, I'm just as guilty at this. Virbo and Airbnb, those reviews makes me a better property manager. It makes me a better host because I know I'm going to get reviewed. I know I don't want to lose that super host status or that premier partner status. And I'm going to do whatever I can to kind of jump through those hoops to do that. And the same thing is going to happen here. I think it's going to elevate the entire industry, knowing that you're being held a little bit more accountable.

And those metrics are going to be shined on. So I think it does elevate everybody here.

Jasper Ribbers (19:25.448)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper Ribbers (19:29.739)
So anybody who's listening, who's managing properties can jump on the website, comparent.com, and create a listing. Or are there certain conditions?

Brooke Pfautz (19:41.598)
Yeah, yeah. So anyone can go on. So you can go on there. We have, like I said, at launch over 5,000 different companies already, because we have this huge database just from being in this industry for so long, having Ventory for the last five years. We have probably one of the largest databases of vacation rental managers out there. So we launched with that from the gates. So go in there, see if your listing exists. It's real simple, real easy to do. You can do a quick search on the site to see if your listing exists.

If it does, you can just claim that listing, and that's probably the best and easiest way to do it, because then all your metrics are already coming over. If you're not on there, just go ahead and create a new listing. You can do it. You can literally claim a listing in five minutes. And then from there, I would say start gathering homeowner reviews. Because homeowner reviews, eventually the algorithm, the number one, like kind of waiting in our algorithm, is gonna be homeowner reviews. So start gathering those reviews, push them out. Now we will not take down bad reviews.

Jasper Ribbers (20:21.853)
Mm-hmm.

Brooke Pfautz (20:37.482)
So if unfortunately one of your owners finds your website and gives you a one star, don't come to me, you know, pleading with me to take it down because it has to be transparent, it has to be legit. If everybody has five stars, it doesn't, it might as well be not even have the reviews on there. Now, if it's a bogus review and we have some different steps in place of verifying like legit reviews and things like that, we will take those down 100%. There's an easy way in the back end of the system to flag those reviews. So if your competitor went there and tried to…

Jasper Ribbers (20:38.282)
Yeah

Brooke Pfautz (21:06.182)
leave a bogus review on your property, we'll catch that and you can flag it. We'll take it down, but bad reviews we will not take down. I just want to make it very, very clear. Get those off the record. Nobody's listening to this, right, Jasper? Send the reviews link to your owners that you know are going to leave a great review.

Jasper Ribbers (21:08.457)
Hehehe

Jasper Ribbers (21:25.977)
Yeah, that's a good one. OK, so you have like 5,000 property managers on the platform. But now, of course, the million dollar question is how many homeowners?

Brooke Pfautz (21:37.258)
Yeah, so, and again, I want to make this very clear. Like this just launched four weeks ago. So we just launched this. So this is going in phases. So phase one is all about getting as many listings verified as possible. Phase, call it 1B, is gonna be to start gathering those homeowner reviews, really incentivizing and making sure the sorting algorithm is based on those homeowner reviews. And then step three, it's then all about driving traffic. But look, we, you know.

Remember, for the last 15 years of my career, 16 years of my career, I've really focused on inventory acquisition. And for the last five years, obviously with having inventory, really this has been my primary focus is going out there and driving homeowner traffic. So I think we know this probably better than anybody on the planet. We do have, I would argue, the largest database of vacation rental homeowners on the planet. I think we have over 10.8 million absentee owner records. We've got close to half a million emails and phone numbers from these homeowners.

Jasper Ribbers (22:13.454)
Mm-hmm.

Brooke Pfautz (22:32.534)
So we know we're scraping all the OTAs, we're scraping all the large venture backed companies, their target list and things like that. So we've got a really extensive database. So what we're gonna be doing is, once we kind of get to a critical mass of people on there, of vacational managers on the website, we're then gonna start driving that traffic there. So we're gonna do that through digital marketing, we're obviously gonna do it through PPC, there's a lot of other email marketing, and then obviously,

you know, do some of the things we've been doing on the Venturi side to drive that traffic there. But the good news is it's free. It doesn't cost you a dime. So you got nothing to lose. Go on there, claim your listing before your competitors grab your listing. Uh, and you know, make sure you capture that and, uh, you know, start, just make your profile look really good. Cause we are going to be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, um, driving homeowner traffic to this website. Cause that's the way this, that's the only way this works. But we have probably one of the best digital marketing teams out there to

Jasper Ribbers (23:09.347)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jasper Ribbers (23:29.559)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, and even just having the listing, you might be able to just use that as credibility. When you're talking to homeowners, too, you could see like, hey, check out our listing on Comparant. We have 4.9 average, homeowner review, whatever it is.

Brooke Pfautz (23:31.502)
to be able to drive traffic here.

Brooke Pfautz (23:47.978)
Eventually, you're absolutely right. This, it's a third party validating you as a professional manager. And that's, we call those trust icons. And we are, you know, something in the works, something we're gonna be launching next year is we're gonna create our own list called like the Comparent 100 or the Comparent 500 or Market Leader. So just like some of these other, you know, websites like Captera and G2 and things like that, we're gonna have like the, you know, Market Leader or a list of like the.

Think of it like the Inc 500, like the top 500, the Comparant 500, the top 500 vacation rental management companies. So now, I mean, you can use that in your pitches. You can say, hey, we've been validated by Comparant, you know, an unbiased third party, and they called us one of the top vacation rental management companies in this industry. And that just builds that little bit of trust and credibility. So again, the only way you can get that is if obviously you're listed on there.

And again, the greatest waiting is going to be obviously based on those homeowner reviews. So it's really important to claim your listing and start gathering those homeowner reviews.

Jasper Ribbers (24:51.783)
Yeah. Yeah, it's huge. I mean, I've stayed at about a hundred Airbnb's and a lot of them have been managed by local property management companies. And I don't know what your opinion on this is, but like, I feel like there's quite a bit of room for improvement for a lot of companies. So yeah, I think it's good to have this where you can really like show, you can show like, hey, you know, this is the reviews that we are getting, right? Check out.

Brooke Pfautz (25:11.295)
Yeah.

Jasper Ribbers (25:20.927)
check out the reviews of other property managers. I've done some searches on Google as well. Just out of curiosity, looking at companies in my area and there's quite a few of them with very low review scores.

Brooke Pfautz (25:34.726)
It kind of blew my mind how many of these large companies that are picking up market share and actually are adding, hundreds and hundreds of properties, how bad the reviews were. And again, this is part of the catalyst of this. It's like there's been no optics on this, that information. I mean, look, you and I could probably figure out how to find somebody's Airbnb review scores, drill down and find out the property manager level, but it's gonna take us a little while, but we're in the industry.

the average homeowner is not going to be able to get, they're not going to do that. They're not going to go through that. They're going to, you know, they're going to do a quick Google search, oh, their website looks good. And then you think about it too. It's like the buying cycle here, if you're a vacation rental homeowner, if you think about how long the process takes, you know, you have to go through there. You have to find all the companies in your market. You then have to reach out to every one of them. Half the time, they're not even going to, actually two thirds of the time, they're not even going to answer the phone call. I think I've given you this stat before. When we secret shopped 100 property managers,

Jasper Ribbers (26:07.955)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper Ribbers (26:31.499)
Yeah

Brooke Pfautz (26:33.166)
They only pick up the phone 33% of the time. So they're not even gonna pick up the phone. Then if you leave a message, they only called us back 57% of the time. So it's like this like, and it's just this brain damage game of like going through this whole process. And then you have to then decide which one to go with. And they don't know what questions to ask. So what do they ask? What's your commission? That's, and it becomes a race to the bottom. So here, the thesis behind Comparent is, it allows the homeowner to do that shopping and comparing in advance.

Jasper Ribbers (26:53.527)
Mm-hmm.

Brooke Pfautz (27:03.126)
they can narrow it down to maybe two or three companies based on the reviews, based on the metrics, based on everything that they see on Comparrent. And then they say, you know what? These are the two companies I'm gonna choose to, then they can reach out to them, through Comparrent by the way, and then they can respond directly through the platform. It's just gonna make the buying cycle so much easier. And look, Jasper, this is not a novel concept. This has been done in every other vertical.

for some reason has never been done in the short-term rental industry. And I figured Venturi, the experience that I had with Venturi, we were positioned better than anybody on the planet to make this happen. We had the database, we have the largest database of Acacia rental managers, and we have the largest database of Acacia rental homeowners. We're creating a marketplace that connects those two. It's just like I said, I'd kick myself if I woke up one morning and somebody else kind of tried to launch this.

Jasper Ribbers (27:32.747)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper Ribbers (27:54.051)
Yeah, yeah, I hear you. Isn't it isn't it interesting, interesting that this, you know, this exists in any other industry, except for ours? Like, why is that?

Brooke Pfautz (28:03.854)
I have no idea. Andrew McConnell with Renned, who sold the track, he created a concept that was called Vacation Rental Futures. It was a concept very similar to this. I remember I explained this idea to a couple people and they're like, oh, Andrew already tried that, it doesn't work. Well, first off, I think it was Mark Andreessen with Andreessen and Horowitz, one of the largest venture capital firms out there. He said, there's no bad businesses, just bad timing.

You know, and maybe just, you know, Andrew didn't have the right data at that point. And when I had the pleasure, it was actually kind of a cool concept experience, actually, at VRA May this past year when we were launching Comparant, I had the pleasure of actually giving Andrew a demo of it. And it was really cool to kind of see his reaction. And first off, he was blown away by it. He was, he was going to give me some congratulatory, you know, remarks. But he said, you know what, Brooke, what you did, though, was you took it from a different concept. We took it from the homeowner concept first.

And then what we did is like had the property managers bid on the property on the homeowner. You're shifting it. You're looking at it from all the property managers listed and then let the homeowners search for them. So it was kind of a twist. So it's a similar business, a similar concept, but it was a 180 degree difference. And again, we have all the content, we have all the data out of the gates that's going to make this a lot easier. I mean, I think

If I would have tried to launch this even five years ago, I probably wouldn't have been able to just because we didn't have the data at the time.

Jasper Ribbers (29:33.939)
Yeah. Yeah, and it's also about execution, right? I mean, I think Airbnb is, well, online marketplaces are very hard to build to start with, right? I mean…

Brooke Pfautz (29:42.382)
They are. Well, it's a little bit of a chicken, sorry to interrupt, but it's a little bit of a chicken and egg, right? You know, for a marketplace, you got to have one side. And that's what I think why, because we have the data, because we have over 5,000 companies, we have all their metrics, we have their reviews, we have their Airbnb metrics, their Verbo metrics, their Google My Business reviews, at least there's something there out of the gates for homeowners to go to. So even if, you know, the property manager isn't claiming their listing, they're going

you know, and it's not on there, you at least have something like if you go to a market, you know, we have over 25 different companies, I think, in Breckenridge, you know, out of the gates before one person even verified their listing.

Jasper Ribbers (30:15.063)
Mm-hmm.

Jasper Ribbers (30:23.495)
Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I mean, you know, when you look at the story of Airbnb, like Airbnb obviously became a success. But if you look at the struggle they went through

become successful, right? The thing with Greclis, Greclis what they did, right? And traveling around the country and literally like going to people's homes and trying to figure out why are these homes not getting booked? And I think Brian Chesky had like 25 credit cards, they were selling cereal to stay alive. I mean, you know, it's so hard to build a marketplace, right? So the execution is…

Brooke Pfautz (30:58.699)
It is.

Jasper Ribbers (31:03.119)
is huge and you're in a great position to do it because you have all the experience and you have all the data, you have all the knowledge. Last question, I was just curious, it's good that you set those expectations, it's a new company so we shouldn't expect creating a listing and the phone to go off like 20 times a day with homeowners trying to reach out to us.

Brooke Pfautz (31:25.526)
Although we did have, we did have, literally like in the first week, we had somebody, they reached out to us, was one of our inventory partners. They said, hey guys, we got two leads already from Comparrent. And I was like, no way. There's no way that happened. They must have been mistaken. But we actually logged in their system. They got two legit leads in the first week. We're not even marketing it, Jasper. I don't know how they got it. We've done like two posts on LinkedIn and like two emails. That's it. And that was, again, just trying to get vacational managers to claim their listings. So it-

Jasper Ribbers (31:43.934)
Nice.

Yeah.

Jasper Ribbers (31:55.125)
Yeah.

Brooke Pfautz (31:55.314)
It will work, I have no doubt in my mind. Sorry, go ahead.

Jasper Ribbers (31:58.503)
Sure. My question was, once there's a lot of homeowners on the platform, what's the process for them to reach out? Is there going to be a messaging functionality on the platform where there's communication, or do they reach out straight to you for the infile?

Brooke Pfautz (32:16.17)
Yeah, so luckily already in the system right now, you have the ability to communicate through it. So if the homeowner goes in there and they compare and they narrow it down to two or three companies, they can reach out right through the platform really easy. It goes in there. If you're a Venturi partner, you'll obviously be eventually it'll be connected to the Venturi CRM and marketing automation platform. So a lot of those responses will happen automatically because again, we know how important that is to respond quickly. But yeah, there is a messaging component built into our.

Jasper Ribbers (32:46.547)
Awesome. Sweet. Anything you want to share that we haven't discussed yet?

Brooke Pfautz (32:51.998)
Yeah. So again, we're just trying to level the playing field. We're trying to get transparency in the process. We want to make it really easy for the best vacational managers to, you know, to shine and for them to, you know, to grow their inventory. Again, we've got some really cool stuff we're going to be doing launching next year. We're going to be implementing some, some AI sales chat bots and things like that. But again, it's free out of the gates, free to claim your listing, free to start receiving leads.

Eventually, we'll start adding some sorting algorithms and some prioritizing based on paid sponsorships and things like that. That AI sales chatbot will probably be an upgrade. We will always, always have a free version and we will always be able to gather homeowner reviews and you'll always be able to claim or get leads for free on the platform. There's really no reason not to do it.

Jasper Ribbers (33:47.275)
Amazing. So everybody who was listening, go to Comparrent.com. C-O-M-P-A-R-E-N-T. And you can create your listing for free. I don't think it takes much time. How much time does it take to create a listing? Boom. Awesome. All right. Last question. Brooke, are you going to Darm?

Brooke Pfautz (34:01.924)
Yes, under five minutes, you can claim your listing.

Brooke Pfautz (34:10.858)
I am, yeah, you gonna be there? Awesome, looking forward to it, man.

Jasper Ribbers (34:12.587)
Sweet, I'll see you there then. Yeah, it's gonna be fun. And if you don't know what Darm is, it's a conference in Nashville next week that focuses on data and revenue management. I'm gonna be there, Eric is gonna be there, Brooke's gonna be there. I'm sure a lot of people that were at the VRMA last month are going to be there. So with that said, Brooke, appreciate you jumping on and appreciate you.

sharing your knowledge through this book, Vacation Rental Secrets, and innovating, yeah, coming up with innovating concepts to drive our industry forward. So, appreciate it.

Brooke Pfautz (34:51.638)
Thanks Jasper, appreciate it.

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