Revenue Mastery: How to Stay Ahead in the Short-Term Rental Game (Ep-629)

In this episode, Jasper Ribbers and Tom Sharkey discuss the latest updates in their podcast journey, the introduction of new team members, and the intricacies of revenue management in the short-term rental industry. They share insights on the importance of daily focus in revenue management, the evolving market trends, and strategies for optimizing bookings during low seasons. The conversation emphasizes the significance of understanding booking windows, pacing, and utilizing data to make informed decisions in a competitive landscape.

Takeaways

Jasper is committed to continuing the podcast for the foreseeable future.
The team has expanded to manage over 600 listings.
Revenue management requires daily focus and cannot be a side task.
The short-term rental market is becoming increasingly competitive.
Understanding booking windows is crucial for effective revenue management.
Preparation for low seasons should start well in advance.
Pacing helps gauge market demand and adjust strategies accordingly.
Flexibility in minimum night stays can attract more bookings.
Data-driven decisions are essential for optimizing revenue.
The team is excited to serve clients and expand their services.

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Jasper Ribbers (00:01.068)
What's up everybody. Welcome back to get paid for your pad. Now haven't been able to record a lot of podcasts lately and I'll, give everybody a quick update on what's going on behind the scenes. I've received quite a few emails from people asking like, Hey, what's going on? Like where's the weekly podcast? are you quitting or, and know, things like that, but, I am not quitting. I will continue this podcast for as long as the foreseeable future and maybe even for.

my entire life, who knows. But yeah, it's been a very hectic time for me. We moved apartments about a month ago, so that kind of took a lot of time. And then also, it's been very, very busy with our new revenue management service. We are now up to 16 clients with over 600 listings in the management. And we just have a huge pipeline of companies that are interested in working with us.

It's been super exciting and super fun, but also it's been pretty hectic to manage all that. And so I am very, very, very happy that we now have two new team members on our team that are supporting me because 600 listings is a lot more than I can handle by myself. So today I want to introduce our newest team member, Mr. Tom Sharkey. Tom, welcome to the show.

Tom Sharkey (01:25.802)
Thanks Jasper, pleasure to be on. yeah, representing the FreeWild brand, reach out to us. We're looking for more clients. I'm a new team member of FreeWild and super excited to be part of Jasper's team. learning a lot and just trying to dish out as much value as I can.

Jasper Ribbers (01:28.524)
Yeah, yeah man.

Jasper Ribbers (01:33.867)
You

Jasper Ribbers (01:50.966)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's cool that we're both wearing the FreeWild shirt. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can see our cool t-shirts that we created for FreeWild. But yeah, Tom, why don't you give us a quick background? You have a lot of experience in the short-term rental space, so we'd love to get a quick intro from you.

Tom Sharkey (02:10.88)
Yeah, so I started with short-term rentals in 2018, just with my own personal property, rented out on the weekends and then quickly found out, all right, this is, this can be definitely a lucrative business. And then I started to do the rental arbitrage on a couple of units and then quickly found, just networked with a bunch of real estate investors for managing their properties. I remember going to real estate.

real estate meetups and just saying, is anyone doing this? And everyone's like, no, it's too much work. And I was like, you're right. It's a lot of work. I'll do it for you. And just kind of showed some people the numbers and they're like, okay, these are pretty good numbers and doing double, triple or sometimes more than what a long-term rental would do. And so I quickly…

Scaled up from about three units to a little over 50 units in the span of about two years My market was Kansas City the Kansas City area mostly on the Missouri side But I did go into Kansas and also went into southern Missouri for a few units like the Lake of the Ozarks and and then Loved the business loved loved ever had a ton of learning lessons. My strategy was buy and hold

some rental arbitrage, and that did pretty well. then, but really my bread and butter was the, was the management for other clients. And at the time when I got started, Kansas City had some reasonable regulations. And so I thought I was pretty safe by scaling and really only staying in Kansas City. But then in 2013, yeah, they,

or excuse me, 2023, they passed regulations that were very stringent and essentially squashed the industry, except unless you got grandfathered. I had a couple properties that got grandfathered into it, so I'm okay there, but a lot of my clients, they did not get grandfathered in. And so I descaled the company over a span of a year, because I just saw it coming. I'm like, right.

Tom Sharkey (04:38.282)
Better get ahead of it. You know, I kind of advise my clients get a longterm renter in there, get it on the market. Interest rates are going up, like not a bad time to sell, you know, or get a, get a longterm renter in there. And so, and then I, you know, landed that plane about a couple months ago and then, then saw a job opportunity with a, with Jasper free while. And I was like, I know where that guy's going. So I want to follow him.

Ha

Jasper Ribbers (05:10.165)
Yeah, and shout out to Steve Trover at Better Talent. That's the company that we're using to hire all of our new employees. And we're still looking for a review management assistant to help Tom and I with the management of our portfolios. So if you are interested in that position, then go over to bettertalent.com and you should be able to find our page.

And I have to say Better Talent was great to work with. They really supported us on the hiring side and took a lot of work off our plate and brought a lot of value when it comes to really understanding who's the perfect candidate. They have a very easy to use CRM as well, where we can see all the applicants. We can move them to different stages in the process. And it's been an awesome experience. So shout out to Better Talent. If you are looking to hire, I highly recommend working with them.

By the way, how was that experience on your side Tom?

Tom Sharkey (06:12.828)
It was good. It was clean. They had me fill out a personality index and I thought that was really interesting. I'm imagining that there's some kind of mapping tool of like, this person's analytical or this person's maybe influential. And then just, I think I got like a trip of emails, but yeah, was a really good process from a job hunter standpoint too.

Jasper Ribbers (06:42.966)
Yeah. Yeah. I love the psychology tests that they do. Basically they, based on the role, they create a certain like personality, profile that would fit that role best. And that's something that I think is very, very important because obviously we need like the experience and the skill sets and all of that. but it's really important that, you know, you have the personality that kind of fits the role because otherwise like you're, just not going to be happy in that role. Right.

Like for example, know, just, to give a quick example, like somebody who's so when you do revenue management, it's a lot of looking at numbers by yourself on a laptop and you kind of have to enjoy that process. Like if you're somebody who kind of needs to be, you know, around people and socializing, then, you know, you're not going to be, you're not going to be able to really enjoy this type of job. Right. So it's, it's really important that we find like the right, personality, but also what's very important for us is the right culture fit.

I think that's something that a lot of companies kind of underestimate and something that we've learned definitely the hard way of, know, when you, when you need, when you need a team member, you usually like want that person fast, right? Cause you have a lot of work on your plate and you're trying to get that work off your plate. And so it's like, okay, the sooner we can get that person, the better. And so it's very tempting to just, just look at like experience and skillset and just, you know, the first person that you feel like can do the job. You, you, just kind of want to hire that person.

but then like it's so, it saves so much time. If you spend a little bit more time to really, you know, figure out like, is, has this person have the right personality? Does this person fit our culture, the culture of our company? there's a saying that if you don't, if you don't create the culture, like your, employees will. Right. So it's very important that you understand the culture of your company and you really look for that culture fit there. So we spent quite a bit of time. I think, I think we spent about two months.

you know, from the start all the way until we, we started with Tom like two weeks ago. So, just as a little, piece of advice there, if you are going to hire it and, know, really take your time. Another saying is, I think this is, I think there's a book called who that talks about hiring. And one thing that always stuck with me is like higher, higher, slow and fire fast, which we've in the past definitely done the opposite higher, like the first person that can do the job.

Jasper Ribbers (09:10.712)
And then when you find out it's actually not a good culture fit, you're kind of hesitant to let them go because that means you have to start over and that's not very appealing. Anyway, we could do a whole other podcast on hiring and I'm sure we will in the future. But today we want to talk more about revenue management because that's what Tom and I are doing on a daily basis. That's where we spend all of our time on. I have gotten rid of pretty much everything else that was on my plate.

with, with new team members that have been added to the free while team. So I am pretty much like a hundred percent in revenue management right now. And so is Tom. So I want to talk about, you know, what, what, what did you learn so far, Tom? What are some of the things that we've learned over the last couple of months in revenue management? think, I think there's a lot, that we can share. I'll start it off with just kind of expressing what I've learned from all the companies that have applied for our service. And like I said, we have 16 clients now.

with just over 600 listings, but we've had over 100 companies, I think, apply. Another re-company that applies is the right fit. We're looking for a very specific type of company to work with, but we do try to help everybody who's applying as much as possible by directing them in a certain way or providing some resources. But yeah, one thing that's become really clear to me through this process is that

People are definitely in the industry starting to realize that revenue management is not something that you can just do on the side for like an hour to a week. It requires daily focus and it sounds like everyone's kind of learning that in the industry. You know, as, as we all know, it's gotten a lot more competitive out there. and, and so, you know, the set it and forget it strategy of basically having a pricing tool do your revenue management. it's just not really working anymore.

right, in order to outperform, really requires a specific focus from somebody who has the skill set and somebody who loves numbers and graphs and looking at that stuff the whole day, right? So it's been interesting to see that mentality shift. I remember when I first started using a pricing tool, I had that same mindset of like,

Jasper Ribbers (11:29.144)
All right, cool. So now the pricing tool is going to do all the pricing for me and I can just sit back and let it do its thing. But it's really more like, think, Tom, I know you love analogy. So I'm going throw analogy out there. It's like the car and the driver, right? You can have the fastest car in the world, right? But if you're going to race and you don't know how to drive that car, it's going to end up on the side of the road, right?

It's, it's the car is not going to win that race by herself. And I think that's a great analogy. And I think actually like I borrowed that from, from, from Mr. John and who also manages revenue. I think he came up with that analogy first. So shout out to him. But, but yeah, Tom, what's your, what's your fault on that? Like you've, you've managed like 50 listings. you've done the revenue management. Like what, what have you kind of learned throughout the years around that, around that topic?

Tom Sharkey (12:22.528)
Yeah, I think the market, short-term rental market, or I should say the short-term rental industry is maturing and has been maturing for the past about two years or so. There was COVID and then there was the comeback of travel and people were tired of lockdowns and all that stuff. And then it's really market dependent, but somewhere along the way.

maybe travel has kind of tapered off since that kind of initial boom of releasing of the lockdowns. And so, you know, just to answer it into another analogy, it's like a big tree, that short-term rental industry tree, and everyone's going up and picking the low-hanging fruit. And the low-hanging fruit, it might still be there in some markets, but at least what we're seeing now is the…

the industry is just getting a lot more competitive and it's already picked off that low-hanging fruit. And so you need those people who are like, no, you know, I got a ladder and now I'm going to get into there. And actually I got this, you know, this tool to, I don't have to climb a ladder. can, I can extract fruit from the, from the branches. so all the analogies break down eventually, but no hanging fruits gone. I think in most markets, unless you're kind of in just one of those quiet markets that, know, you're a

you're a leader in or not many people really know about. And so, you know, as far as revenue management goes, I think, like you said, and we're all guilty of this, think, upset and forget it. you know, unless you've scaled so large that now you can take on a revenue manager to go there and just be full time, you know, I kind of say satellite mode, satellite stay open to collect a bunch of data.

Jasper Ribbers (14:15.916)
you

Tom Sharkey (14:16.18)
You need someone sitting at the computer, you know, daily to be looking at the market every day, looking where's that booking window, what's the length of stay? And then just being able to absorb all that market data and also, you know, really honing in on your filters. You're only as smart as your filters. There's so much noise out there in the market.

but you got to make sure you're selecting, you know, your comp sets are accurate to your portfolio or to a specific, you know, property if you're just managing a property or two. And so, you know, it is a good time to consider reaching out to FreeWild and asking if you, and Phil and out there, our,

our survey to see if you qualify and if it's a good fit because really it's a competitive market out there. You really need a professional or a team of professionals that's dedicated. There is a clear difference between property management, the upkeep, the maintenance, the cleaning of the property, the guest communication of having that hospitality of

whether it's VAs or whether you're communicating to the guests yourselves, those are very different skill sets of maintaining a property, communicating to guests, and revenue management. Those three right there are very different. And then there's all marketing, kind of business aspect of making sure you're on different OTAs. And that really goes into, and at FreeWild, we really help out with that revenue management as well.

hey, how many OTAs are you on? And really, we're really just dedicated to revenue management. We could be an extension of the business, if you will.

Jasper Ribbers (16:23.608)
100%. And how did you manage the revenue management when you were still operating those 50 units? Was that your focus? Obviously, I know you love doing it. That's why you joined our team. But what was your experience like? Was it easy for you to do that with everything else that you had going on?

Tom Sharkey (16:44.872)
It was not easy. No, especially in the low season of all the seasons. think I crushed it in the summer season, but then I whiffed a lot of the times. Not on every single property, but I whiffed a lot on the slow season because I didn't do the prep work for slow season, which it's larger time net, say, is like, all right, for low season, at least in my market, it seemed you need to…

prepare for that low season starting in August or September. Like really start pricing your places in January and February to get some of those month plus days or just start getting bookings because I just remember, I started in 2018 and there was a few years in a row where I was like, I'll get last minute bookings. Yeah, I will get last minute bookings, but.

they're only for the weekends. so that was one area that I definitely could have worked on more. then when it came to peak season, I just remember doing really good, blowing it out of the water.

Jasper Ribbers (18:00.868)
Yeah. Yeah. think, I think that's something that has kind of seeped into our strategies when it comes to revenue management because COVID it was, the market was so strong, right? After COVID that it became like a thing to, have like huge, future premiums and like, nobody, nobody was concerned about just getting bookings, right? Everyone was just focused on like, get more units, right? and so.

It wasn't really bookings, getting bookings wasn't the hardest part. And so people didn't really think about like, hey, the slow season is coming up in a couple months. Like we should adjust our prices now. We should not be adding a premium to those dates. We need to get as many bookings as possible for January or February. If you're in a market where that's the low season, right? And making those days easy to book, right? Not putting like huge…

minimum night stay restrictions on those dates. Cause when the demand is low, we, gotta be, we gotta be as flexible as possible to attract as many bookings as possible. Right. And I think now people are kind of starting to realize that, because I'm sure everybody has gone through this experience of, you know, looking at that empty calendar and then looking at the competition and seeing like where the competition is priced at and just realizing like, wow, right. As of right now, like because I'm so late.

thinking about this stuff, I now have to basically like undercut the competition in order to get booked. And that's not, that's not a great feeling, is it?

Tom Sharkey (19:37.12)
Right, yeah. If you see the last year in your low market that your market was booked, you know, 35, 40 percent, well, what do want to be? You know, you want to be competing for that 35, 40. You know, you don't want to be competing last minute for that. What if you start putting friendly prices way ahead of time and you're booked at 60 percent? Now, you you got to make sure that, you know, you're pricing safely so you're getting your target. Yes. But

but how I've viewed in some of the properties in my portfolio, some of my clients advise me, hey, if we can just get the bills paid, because we're gonna crush it in the peak season, can we just pay the bills in the low season? And I loved it when clients told me that, it's like, you get it. Yeah, this is not the money, maybe, let's try to make money. Let's not to say that we don't try and make money, but.

but that's not the money making months. You know, that's not the time where risk on is. And the other thing I keep in mind too is just the macro trends. Interest rates have been going up, you know, past couple of years and you know, the economy is slowing down. There's not a lot of corporate travel. And so small businesses and large corporations, it's the easiest thing. We're in an industry where, whether it's personal budgeting or corporate budgeting,

were the easiest thing to cut. I mean, I can't think of anything else, unless you're talking about frivolous spending. so just know the season, know the markets, know we're ending a business cycle. good thing is, a couple of weeks ago, the Fed pivoted. So maybe we'll be entering a new business cycle, which does mean more money.

It means more money out there and more money to land and reservations for your properties.

Jasper Ribbers (21:42.796)
Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. so you've been working for free while now for, about two weeks or so. what, what are some things that you've learned or noticed or w what's kind of been your experience so far in the last two weeks?

Tom Sharkey (22:00.0)
And I took your course, the Cache Fillet Mastery course, just consumed it all in about a week, in the first week, just taking notes, putting it to practice, using some of those tools that you supplied. some of the major takeaway, I mean, there's been a lot of major takeaways, but one of them is tracking that booking window.

the booking window and your pacing. So pacing is are you on course kind of like what you were last year? If last year you were at, the whole market was at 35%, is the market this year at 35 % or 32 %? Are you about pacing? Or is the market this year at 45 % and last year was 35 %?

Okay, what's going on? That means there's a higher demand this year. So just tracking the pacing, tracking the booking window, because that's the opportunity. I see that as like, maybe not an on and off switch, but like a very sensitive dial, if you will, that has, that you need to be honed in on that. It's kind of a sweet spot to find.

Hey, after this time, 50 % of the bookings are coming in. And before this time, 50%. That's the needle you need to keep an eye on. And the pacing is a helpful tool, too, to kind of see how last year's benchmark was. And is it different? Or is it less demand? Or is it more demand? Or is it about the same? That's been a big one.

Jasper Ribbers (23:49.718)
Yeah, booking window. Yeah, yeah. Booking window is super interesting, mostly because we don't actually know the booking window until after the fact, right? We can make an estimate of what we think the booking window is going to be based on last year, based on what we're currently seeing in the markets. But we really don't know it until after the fact, which makes it.

Makes it one of the most interesting parts of revenue management. mean, revenue management is a food of unknowns, right? And that way it's just why it's like almost more of an art than a science or kind of, it's kind of in the middle, just kind of like economics, right? They call economics like the, think they call it like the dismal science or something like that. Cause some people will argue like, it's not a science. Like you can't, you know, you can't like come to like a hard conclusion. You can only kind of like make, look at correlations and look at.

you know, empirical data to kind of, you know, predict things and, but you can't really, it's not like mathematics where it's like one plus one is two and nobody can argue about that. Right. and it's revenue management is kind of that way too. there are some hard laws, of course. I mean, there's the law of supply and demand. There's a law, there's a number of economic laws that kind of apply, but booking windows, definitely a very interesting one. And it can, you can kind of freak out.

If the booking window shrinks, which it kind of has done in a lot of markets, I'm looking at certain ski markets, for example. A lot of ski markets, bookings are down quite a bit. The ski season is like December to March. And I know there's a lot of operators right now who are telling me that they don't have as many bookings. They don't have, especially for Christmas and New Year. And so there's

starting to freak out a little bit of like, wow, what's happening? Last year in September, I was at 30, 40 % occupancy and now I'm at like 15 or 20, right? Is that just because people are booking later or has the demand softened? That's always the big question. It's like, did the booking window shift or are we pacing towards like a very weak season? And you can't really tell, right? Until you actually…

Jasper Ribbers (26:12.184)
until after the fact, then you really know, you can look back and say, okay, sometimes I've seen some of my portfolios where we were pacing way behind, but then it would catch up towards the end of the month. So looking back, the market actually did the same as last year or maybe slightly better. But when you were looking a month in advance, you'd think that it would be a very bad month.

Right? So it's like, this is an example of like, sometimes it's the booking window that changed and sometimes it's demand that has changed or supply. So what are your thoughts on that?

Tom Sharkey (26:49.044)
Yeah, yeah, some of the markets that I've looked into in our portfolios is like, you know, for instance, occupancy right now for for, let's say, Thanksgiving or no, let's let's use let's use Christmas. Christmas in a lot of the markets is not the booking windows, not right now. It's let's say it's let's say the occupancy is

20 % right now for Christmas. Just seems, we'll say 15%. And, but then you look at the the final occupancy of last year and it was at, you know, 86%, you know, and it's like, okay, it's clearly not the booking window right now. And you look at the pickup, you look at the last, you look at the last 30 days or three, seven days. And, and so you,

You get certainty, you get some clarification. Right now is not the time to really hone in on that specific holiday. That's something that's coming around the bend. Right now it's Thanksgiving. And so, yeah, it's important to watch that pacing and that difference too. Hey, we're pacing that last year.

the bookings just don't come right now. They just don't. And so if you freak out and you're like, gotta drop my prices 50 % or 25 % and you get booked right now, well, you got booked before the demand wave came. So you're looking for that demand wave. It's not there right now. It's kind of like surfing. Do you go out surfing when the waves are bad and are you freaking out? No, you plan to go out surfing when the waves are awesome.

And you wait for that demand wave.

Jasper Ribbers (28:48.088)
Is good surfing in Savannah where you live?

Tom Sharkey (28:52.045)
I've seen some surfers, yeah, over on Tybee Island and, I wouldn't say good, no, but I've seen a little bit.

Jasper Ribbers (29:00.862)
I live five minutes from the beach now, so I have no excuse not to learn how to Other than the water is cold. That's not an excuse either because we can wear a wetsuit, right? But yeah, I love that analogy, right? And you mentioned pickup. I think that's a really important metric to look at. Pickup essentially means like what percentage of the market got booked in the last X amount of days, right? The last seven days or the last 30 days. And so to your point,

Tom Sharkey (29:06.505)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jasper Ribbers (29:29.656)
Like if that booking window has changed, then like Pickup will kind of tell you how it's changing, right? If you're looking at last year and you're like, last year I had way more bookings on the books than now at this time. If you look at the Pickup and you see suddenly like, hey, in the last seven days, it actually like 10 % of the market got booked, right? Then you kind of know like, okay, so probably the booking window is starting now, right? Where last year it was starting more.

move earlier or so. So then you kind of know like, you know, it's almost like looking at pick up is almost like standing on the beach with a with binoculars and seeing if there's any big waves coming in the far out, right? You can kind of predict a little bit what's going to happen that way. But you never know for sure, though. Let's see, let's, you know, we're probably going to do a lot of podcasts together, I'm sure, because we're, you know, we're learning every day. But let's let's just touch on one more.

learning lesson of something that you've noticed or something that you've learned in the last couple of weeks of us working together.

Tom Sharkey (30:38.59)
Yeah, really, really utilizing the neighborhood. So we use price labs pricing tool, super good. You know, we think they're the best, the most friendliest to use. And so I just love their seasonality, their seasonality function on there and just being able to do those, get those market dashboards to find out where's the peak season.

Like there's one thing to go through and say, yeah, I have a feeling that this is peak season and I have a feeling that this is shoulder season, but getting the data to really put those markers there for you to either validate your feeling or to teach you something different. so, then you're able to kind of segment the year of like, okay,

They have a season, what's it called? I can't remember what it's called, but it's a seasonality. I can't remember what it's called, but you get to segment the year and seasons of, okay, this is my low season. It's super customizable with, you can get exact to the dates where if you want to isolate something just for that Thanksgiving weekend or just that Christmas weekend, Christmas week, you can isolate those and call it Christmas week. And so it doesn't, it's not only the month.

But being able to do that, so that way you can kind of, it's hard as an operator to just, you can't just obviously put a blanket statement in terms of pricing and revenue over the whole year or even just per quarter. Like sometimes, for instance, Thanksgiving and Christmas are, they're like weeks that are clear, in many markets they're very clearly different from all the other weeks in the month.

Some in some in many markets, November and December are low season except for those weeks. Those weeks can be like spike. And so it's really helpful to segment and kind of cut your year of in pies and in different sizes of like, hey, during this segment, the pricing does this. It fluctuates on this, you know, high levels during my low during my high season. And then

Tom Sharkey (33:04.568)
and then, depending on your risk, it's all dependent on your risk tolerance, the financials of the property, but with the low season, I really appreciate being able to do that. Like, we're going to, we really want to get bookings here because these are, this is the time to get bookings. This is not the time to be, you know.

going out there aggressively last minute in the low season. So that's been a super helpful tool.

Jasper Ribbers (33:40.867)
Yeah. Yeah, 100%. And just to kind of wrap up this podcast, I'll share one more thing that I'm noticing that I think a lot of hosts can improve on is a lot of people have their minimum night stays settings set up, where it's like, let's say you have like a 2-2 as a default, and then you'll do like a 2-3. And when I say 2-2, I mean like two minimum stay on the weekdays and two on the weekends. And then…

Typically like 30 days out, people will set it at like two free, right? So for the weekends, people book a weekend, like more than 30 days out, you'll have to book like a Friday to Monday or like a Thursday to Saturday, And then they'll typically add, you know, maybe like a free four or a four-four for 60 days out, right? So the further in advance people book, the more restrictive it is when it comes to minimum night stay settings.

And to me, that's something that I've been challenging a lot in all our portfolios because it doesn't really make sense to me. get the idea of like, if somebody books far out, like, you know, we want the longer booking because we don't want these short little bookings blocking a potential longer booking, right? But if you're like, for example, right now, if you have that strategy where you're

Very restrictive, like four or five night minimum stay, like 60 days out. That means that like, you know, December, January, February, it's very hard for people to book. And you have to look at the length of stay, the median length of stay for those months. If you look in the price steps market dashboard, or if you're using key data or air DNA, whatever it is, you can, you can see what the length of stay is. Right. And if the average length of stay is like two nights and.

you're setting your minimum night stay at like four or five, you're pretty much cutting out like 70, 80 % of the demand, right? And that's in your, in January, February might be your slowest months, right? So you might want to recons, if you have those settings, like you might want to reconsider and say like, unless you're going for a, for an MTR strategy, a midterm rental strategy for the winter, where you're just doing monthly stays.

Jasper Ribbers (36:01.206)
If you're focused on short-term rentals, you got to get as many bookings now for those months. And you should not have those long minimum night stay restrictions. It's better to get, even if it's like a couple two or three night stays, it's better to have some bookings there already than waiting, trying to fill that stuff up last minute. And I understand where the reasoning comes from because

Again, people are worried that you get one booking in the middle of January, and now you can't book it out for the entire month. But I think you have to make a strategic choice there. You have to think, OK, what's our strategy for the low season? Is it short-term rentals, or is it mid-term rentals? And both can be a valid option. We have several portfolios where we're doing MTRs for the winter. And so we set it usually like November through March or

sometimes November through February, depending on the markets, we'll put it, or sometimes like January through March, right? Thanksgiving and Christmas are a big demand driver in the market that you might want to keep November and December open for short terms. But if you are focusing on midterm rentals for the winter, then you got to set that strategy up now and you got to make that decision. And there's good ways of doing that using like,

the Airbnb monthly discount, setting your prices higher than what you're targeting in revenue and then adding a discount on Airbnb, at least like 20, 30%, I think is good to attract those monthly stays. But if you're not gonna focus on MTRs, then you gotta get as many bookings now as possible. So you gotta make it very easy for people to book. gotta, to your point, you gotta make sure that pricing is competitive. Don't have that far out premium there.

just decide what rate you're comfortable with and just start attracting those bookings now because the competition probably does have a far premium on there or more restrictive minimum night stay settings. And so if you're the only one who's accepting two night stays in January or February and you already have a competitive price, you're way more likely to start filling up that calendar. And you're sending a signal to Airbnb to another platform, so it's like, hey, I'm being flexible for this time period. Once you get a couple bookings,

Jasper Ribbers (38:22.956)
guess what, the OTA can see that. And if somebody is searching for those months and you already have a bunch of bookings, the OTA knows like, this property already got booked for that month. Let's show this property first, right? And that's how you get momentum for those low season, for those lower, low demand months. So with that said,

Tom, let's wrap up this podcast. appreciate you jumping on here. I'm sure we'll do a lot more podcasts. We have a lot to talk about. And now that you're helping me with the revenue management, I'm going to have more time as well to do these podcasts. So my goal is to do at least one podcast a week. And eventually, once we get a few more team members, in particular the revenue management assistant that we definitely need, then I'll probably go back to…

two times a week every Monday and Friday like I used to do. So with that said, any last words before we wrap up here, Tom?

Tom Sharkey (39:25.78)
Just super excited to be part of the team. We're excited to serve our client base and get more clients. And yeah, this was blast. Can't wait to do it again.

Jasper Ribbers (39:38.048)
Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, we'll be back soon. And if you are interested in our revenue management service, we do have an application form. You can schedule a discovery call with us where we can get to know you and see if it's a good fit for us to work together or not. You can find all that information at freewildfoundry.com slash RPM. So freewildfoundry.com slash RPM. With that said, I hope you'll have a great weekend.

I'm actually going to be in Idlewild, California, where our cabins are located. We just finished the renovation of our Wildwood Park, is what we call it, which is basically two acres of land that we have around our cabins that we've completely renovated with stargazing nets and games and yoga areas and picnic areas. And it's going to be a lot of fun to see that. So.

Tom, thanks for joining man and thanks everybody for listening. We'll be back soon and have a great weekend.