Boom Launches the World’s 1st AiPMS, with CEO Shahar Goldboim

Alex Husner  0:33  
Welcome to Alex and Annie, the real woman of vacation rentals. I'm Alex and I'm Annie, and we are joined today by Shahar Goldboim, who is the CEO and founder of Boom. Shahar, welcome to the show. 

Shahar Goldboim  0:40  
Thank you. Thank you. Great being over here. 

Annie Holcombe  0:41  
So excited to have you. I met you a few times over some calls and your your personality is very warm and infectious, so I can't wait to meet you in person. But before we get started, I would love to learn more about boom. I love saying that tell us about your story and your journey in vacation rentals and how you got to boom. 

Shahar Goldboim  1:09  
Actually, it's interesting. So in 2016 I was doing a startup for real estate to find return in the industry, in the real estate market, and I was also a broker, an investor in the real estate segment, and a friend came to me. We bought for him, like for his parents, actually a house in a fancy neighborhood in eastern shore in Miami, and was telling me, in the end, my parents are not moving, and I want to do it in Airbnb. And I told him, Okay, and what's the connection to me? And told me everything that you do you're really good at, and I would love you to do it. So I told him, You know what, let's let me think about it. And time I was learning about the Lean theory, how can I get to maximum result with minimum efforts? So I told him, You know what, I found a company in Australia that can implement interior design on top of empty picture. So let's do that, meaning we'll take the address of the house, the house itself, just with fake furniture. We listen to an Airbnb. Let's see what happened. So we listened to an Airbnb, and all of a sudden we started receiving reservation after reservation. So I asked my wife, she was like a regional manager of a furniture store, and she's really talented, so I asked her, do you want to design a home? And she's like, hell yeah, we did the first house, so we got a lot of success with it. And then I had a flip that I've done and we changed it to an Airbnb, and I bought a multi family building to a friend of mine. And, long story short, all of a sudden we have a management company as well. When we ran into the management company, I saw a lot of inefficiencies in the market in matter of like, a lot of stuff, and with the startups that we've done, we build an amazing product, but they didn't find the business concept of it. So I moved the team to basically now, to to design VR, to the management company, and I said, you know, it's startup. I don't know how to do but I know how to do businesses. I've done many businesses in my life. So we are going to build a tech enabled company. And that was we've done. We grew design VR to be a company that managed around $150 million of properties. And around a year and a half ago, I decided, You know what, we have the best technology in the world. And kind of like, I would like to separate the companies, because in the end of the day, like, kind of like, I wanted to give the freedom to the to the technology company to really grow, because the operation can go, can grow as much as a technology. So we did the separation, and we moved the boom to be basically a SAS model. When we've done that, I forgot to mention that I built design VR with my young brother alone, that he bring all of the tech element basically into the company, and I brought the business element. And when we decided to do that, we asked also my older brother to join as well. So we are three brother all in into this venture. And my older brother used to be really high level in technology, had 500 employees underneath him, and he bring all of the AI component into the mix of the most robust systems there is. And we build the boom, which is the word first aipms that currently we have.

Alex Husner  4:54  
So it's a great story. And I think we talk about this often on the show that a lot of the tech. Our space. The tech that works really well was built by property managers and, you know, people that really understand the needs of what needs to be built. And they've worked with, you know, technologists to make it, you know, bring that, the concept to life. But I think that is, you know, certainly one of the magic points behind boom is the understanding of the industry and where you saw those, those different needs. So that makes a lot of sense. And actually, you just announced last week that boom is the world's first AI PMS, which is super incredible to be starting a whole new category of pmss, I mean the first and only at this point. So tell us a little bit about the AI functionality behind web bloom offers

Shahar Goldboim  5:44  
so when, when we look, let's just look at all of the concepts. So we have a PMS that you can work on it by yourself. And we have a lot of technology combining inside meaning task management, owner portal, guest, Portal, project management and so on and so on. And how now you take everything and you can infuse AI into it. Meaning, now let's think about a simple question that you would ask me, Can I do an early check in? So if I have like, an AI chat bot, it cannot really give me an answer, because I need to understand, do I have a work order that need to be fixed or and then I need to go to my task management, and then I need to go and see if I have a late checkout on my reservation center right? And then I need to go see if cleaning was done in order to give you the access to get in, meaning that I need to go through different system in order to give you an answer. And that's, that's what kind of boom is doing. So we are not just doing customer support. Our point is to go to all of the office work that you have, meaning customer support, sales, dispatching, bookkeeping, review, management, and take all of the segment and allowing you as a company to do so much more with the same amount of people that you have, you can have much more scalability, if it makes sense. 

Annie Holcombe  7:30  
So in the scenario that you were just talking about, customer wants an early check in, it'll go through everything to make sure that there's no maintenance orders, there's no late checkout, all of that is in place, and then it'll automatically respond to him and say, Absolutely. And then can you do it as an upsell? We'll give it to you for $25 or something like that. 100% not only that, you won't wait for him to tell you, you will offer right? So if I know that all of these capabilities are there, then you will get a notification. Do you want to do an early check in? So, so it's all of the element also in the guest portal, you can, we can ask, like, what is your flight number? And then it will connect it to your flight so there is so much elements that you can do in order to to optimize stuff? Yeah, and so you're doing it as a PMS now, because I believe when I first met you, it was more of like the back of the house kind of operational aspects, and you've moved it into a property management system. Is that correct? Did I understand that? Right? It's like, you know, you're growing, right? So when we first came with with boom, we said, oh, you know what? We have so many stuff. But how can we present all of this stuff? So we start just with the owner portal. When we started, not because we didn't add it's, how do I create the right message? How do I let people know? Because it's, it's a different animal. What we have in Gong it's a different product. So, so how, how we set it, how we we touch into it, and and in the beginning, to be honest, we we wanted to be an overlay on top of PMS, but we found it really hard with a push, meaning of being on a few verticals, on that element, and on the element where we didn't control stuff. So not everybody working the way we would like it to be. We need which data sources we get in order to give, like, the best experience that we can to property management company in order to solve the problem that we want to solve. If it makes sense.

Alex Husner  9:49  
Very cool. Yeah, yeah. And I think when it comes down to the question of, should you have an all in one system, or, you know, should managers be trying to find the best problem? Product that does, you know, one part of the system, and then others that have other, you know, other, other advantages to them. And what I like about boom, from what I've seen now in many different demos, is that, you know, that's the whole crux. And this actually is the answer for everything to be all in one system, because the way that it works the best is when, when it is, because the AI will have access to so much more information that you know, you're going to get the full benefit when everything is, you know, combined into one place. And one thing that I think is just genius that you guys have built is on the on the task management. So, you know, from a guest perspective, if I'm staying in a home in Miami or a condo in Miami, and I arrive, and I have an issue, and I text in that the pool water is green, and now that goes back to boom, and it does an AI response that you can have on copilot, which is also really cool, so managers can test to make sure that they like how things are answered. But from that and how you set it up, it can automatically set a work order to have somebody go out there and look at the pool, so you're not having to wait on calling into an office or emailing into an office, and then somebody being able to respond and do the work order find somebody. It's all automated. So it, from what I can tell, it allows property managers to stay focused more on the important things that they need to be focused on, versus the, you know, crazy amount of manual office type tasks that are necessary in the business. But to this point, there's not been a way to do, you know, add any automation to them 100% and it's also how everything is connected. 

Shahar Goldboim  11:38  
So let's say you send let's say the work order went out and your contractor, the poor guy, arrived to the place. He cleaned the pool. As soon as the pressing done, a notification will come to the guests, saying, Hey, we cleaned your pool. Are you happy? If he's not happy, the guy is still over there. So it's like the connection of the system, the AI, but how everything is talking with everything, which is a big thing. Another thing for companies, it's like the layer. So we have level one, we have level two, we have level three, of complexity. And you, as a company, can say, in this complexity, meaning, I want you to stop and transfer it to a manager, and you can direct the AI how you want to solve the stuff. So think about the company that moving layer one, moving layer two. So just in difficult cases, I have, like now a manager that needs to go in and actually give the service. And you can actually do that. 

Annie Holcombe  12:39  
Do you? Are you able to use it in the reservation realm? So helping people can, like, book their reservation, confirm their reservation, doing upsells on reservations and then post stay, reaching out to them to try to get them to rebook as well. 

Shahar Goldboim  12:57  
Yeah, 100% so, so we have the data. So if they came in May, so for whatever, for visits their parents, for like, birthday or something, so in March or in February, they will get a message, Hey, are you coming again? So all of this automation, all of the understanding of the guests that will be more in the sales, marketing kind of tools of AI, yeah,

Alex Husner  13:26  
yeah, yeah. And I like how you have that flexibility to set up those automations based on what makes sense for the business. And, you know, from the review standpoint, I know that's that's a big component. And just from my experience, I remember at condo world, we had like, three or four people that worked on review responses, and that's pretty common with companies with a lot of inventory, and that process typically is, you know, a review comes in and it might go to maybe the Social Media Manager. They figure out what property they stayed at, but now they've got to go and bring if it was an issue. You have to bring that issue to somebody in property management, and then they have to check, well, who was the cleaner and what was going on, and it's like, so it's when you've got a lot of reservations coming in, like, it just becomes a complete staffing nightmare to keep up with that, and it hurts your review scores, I mean, because it's just not efficient. But the way that boom works when the reviews come in, it's automatically tagging certain things, and it knows who the cleaner is, right? And then it's actually scoring those cleaners in a dashboard where the manager can come in and see where there are issues, either with the home or with the cleaners. Is that correct? 

Shahar Goldboim  14:35  
Yeah. So in other words, I'll translate this way, so we use analytics to understand operations. So we can tell you who is the best companies that serving serving your properties. We can tell you what the review score that the cleaner is getting for the cleanings that you have done. So we have average of every cleaner. We understand the duration of every cleaner, meaning cleaner that. Cleaning faster than others. So first of all, it's creating alignment between the management to the worker. So you can do compensation for people that work really good, or you can get rid of people that are not good. You can also transfer business knowledge, right? So let's say somebody is really quick. You need to ask yourself, why so quick? And it's getting such an amazing review. How can it transfer its knowledge base to other people that are working and put himself as example in a matter of review, what we are doing? We analyzing all of the reviews by AI, and then we can create visualization towards the issues are. So from the review, how much percentage I had issue with the property maintenance, how many I had with a cleaning, with communication within that? So let's say I pick I want to understand the issue that I had with property management. Then how many appliances issue did I had? How many internet issue that I had, and then I can tackle down to which properties add the issues in and understand how we can fix it. So we use data in a lot of ways, and everything is connected, so we can create this visualization and all of that. 

Annie Holcombe  16:17  
So obviously, the use of all these tools and having the AI cuts down on staffing levels. So that's a big cost savings for the customer that's using it. Do you have any studies that say, like, for an average size manager, what kind of cost savings they're going to have in a payroll sense, on a maybe a monthly basis? 

Shahar Goldboim  16:36  
I have because I can tell you how much we are saving in payroll We definitely have,, I it depends on the company we're working with, company, every company, it's not like Hilton or Marriott, 

Annie Holcombe  16:52  
sure, sure. I guess I just saying, like, on average, would you say that somebody could save, you know, 100 hours of labor a month, or, you know, say, an average size manager that's got 25 units or something. I'm just like, ball. 

Shahar Goldboim  17:05  
I'll explain it this way. When you have a company, it depends if you give 24/7 service or not. So if we're looking at customer support, do I give some customer support at night? Do I have a salesperson that dollars His job is to do sales, or do have people that doing customer support and sales. So it's all, it's all of that element. But we, we definitely reducing big amount. 

Alex Husner  17:31  
Yeah, I think for companies that I've spoken to that use boom, the the number one thing that they say is that it's, it's allowed their their core staff to just work, you know, more more effectively and more strategically. But, you know, companies have a lot, a lot of VAs now, and I think that's just been something that's on the rise in recent years because of, you know, so much goes back and forth between, you know, Airbnb and VRBO messages and then reviews, as we just spoke about that, that seems to be like, that's where companies are able to cut down. And I mean that, you know, it's VAs are still certainly an expense, and especially when you have a lot of them. So, and I think you were using a lot of VAs that designed VR. Did it make a difference for your company? 

Shahar Goldboim  18:18  
We left with third of them. So, oh my gosh, wow. Yeah, and, and think about it in that level. So, so let's say I need to extend sales or customer support as for property. So first of all, I need like three, three shifts, right morning, and then evening, and then night. So it's like three people. If you heading, if you're adding the vacation time and off time, then you need more. You need four to five people. Then thinking about the hiring processing. So when I'm going to hire, I need a manager to do it. I need to do the hiring process, HR, then I need a management layer on top of these people, and it's a lot of add ons, right? And then also, when they are coming in, I need to, if they're coming from the vacation rental industry, which a lot of times, that's not the issue, then I need to basically let them know about all of the policies, the mentality of the companies, the vibe of the company up until they up and running. You're talking about a month and a half to two months, if they are not from the industry, we're looking at three to four months till they really good customer support. So so so think about all of that element in your ability to grow as a company, in the scalability of it, and that's it's not just the employee itself. It's the pressure that you have on the other layer of the company, right? It makes sense? Yeah. 

Alex Husner  19:57  
Well, and I mean, we're in a low margin. Business. So, you know, you know, you have to have people. This is a hospitality business. People will never be eliminated. But I think you know, just, it's exciting to see a product like this that just, you know, allows companies to operate more profitably and their people just to focus on being able to provide that hospitality and to take care of their owners and focus on growing their portfolio. What is, how does boom help on that side, as far as owners and transparency and the owner portal, I know that's that's a big thing that is part of one of the selling features, but tell us a little bit more about that.

Shahar Goldboim  20:37  
So the owner report, that actually was the first thing that we created on design VR, because I found it really hard to do all of the reporting in the end of the month. It took me, like a lot of time, a lot of pressure, and I, and I believe in transparency, because transparency really help in alignment of thoughts and also in accountability. So when our our owner portal on the PnL, you can see all of your income, and you can see all of your expenses as an owner. And not only that, that you can see all of the expenses. It's not just a number. Oh, you know what the wall cost you to fix like it's $1,000 you will have pictures, you will have videos that's connected, basically to the task management. So you will understand all of the story, a lot of time, what happening, because we don't know the owner doesn't know the story. They feel there are they're not there are, basically that the management company is still money from them. So somebody will see the chart, and you say, I can't believe it's $1,000 they stealing from me. And then the management company feels everybody else will do it for $2,000 we $1,000 and it's not fair that it's treating us this way. And a lot of times, because it doesn't know what actually happened. And when you look at the video, and you look at the picture, you understand, wow, they did like a really good work. And that's create, like, really a trust in between, and as a result, you can grow, right? So if I have an investor that really believe in us, it would love to buy another property. Another thing that I believe in is create a KPI. So when we have a property, you can see what's the return that you're making on this property? Because I started my mind going always like investment wise, so the way we build it is, what's the return I'm making on this property? Because it's a big thing for investor. He understand. He wants to know how much money I'm making on the money. So if you want it, it's an option to use a property manager, obviously, to pick that you want to have this feature on your portal. But when your investor, owner is coming in, you can see what the return is making. What is cash on cash return, what is cap rate, and so on and so on on the property. 

Annie Holcombe  23:08  
It's interesting. I was prepping recently for a panel discussion with property managers about owner relations, and the discussion was how to keep you know, how to keep owners in tune with what's going on. And the biggest problem that people have is that owners do feel left in the dark, and you're either giving them too much information or you're not giving them enough. It's like trying to find that balance of when to speak to them and when not. So it sounds like you can set up some really great communication tools that I kind of Alex, I think about, like, how do we implement Enneagram into this? Because AI would make it a game and make it fun. But I think one of the things come up, and I think you just touched on it Shahar as a tool, is is, you know, one of the property managers mentioned that they always do work orders attached to the owners their logs, so they can see when stuff's done. So that way, the owner understands the amount of time and attention that's spent in the unit, even if it's just to go replace a coffee pot or to have carpet cleaning, something like this. So they're not just getting bills, they're actually seeing the amount of time that they're putting in the unit. And I think that that's where managers get, get lost in the sauce, so to speak. They're they're doing so many tasks that at some point it just becomes too laborious to put in a work order for everything and follow it through the process. But by this, it just seems like you can get all of these touch points to an owner, to a guest, to the staff, and make people more efficient with their time, but being transparent at the same time, 

Shahar Goldboim  24:35  
100% 100% and that's also create accountability. Also, the owner, have an access to see all of the reviews coming into his property. Can also see where his property is advertised at and and I believe, as much as you have more clear on that, then it's creating like the interface. Phase to create this trust? 

Annie Holcombe  25:02  
Yep, yeah. And trust is, trust is important, not just with owners, but it's trust with guests. So I think that's one of the, one of the themes that has come out of management the last couple of years, that we all have to be building trust with all touch points within the industry. So I love what you're doing there.

Alex Husner  25:21  
I think, you know, there's, there's a lot of focus right now on, on guest experience and the guest journey. And, you know, from, from my perspective, I've been talking about this for years, when I first started going on podcasts, about how we looked at that, and how we map things out, and how important that is, that, you know, it's, it's, it's part of the marketing. I mean, their experience from Not, not necessarily in the property, but how you're communicating with them and when you're communicating with them, is so important. And I think what the cool thing about this is, as as the AI, you know, builds this really comprehensive customer data profile, you know that you're able to do some more things on an automated level, but it's like, you know, the I think the balance there is making it feel like it's, it's a real, authentic communication, but maybe tell us a little bit more about that, of like, how you guys developed the AI so that it does, you know, it has a personality. It's not, it doesn't sound canned, like it actually makes somebody feel like they're, you know, chatting with someone. On the other end,

Shahar Goldboim  26:21  
it's understanding the data, right? So if I know all of the communications that you had in the last five years, and everything I take into a data source, I understand your policy better than you do, because it's really also hard to understand. Let's say now I have 30 agent in the Philippine answering somebody going all to all of their inbox in order to understand if they understand the policy or not. It's really hard right to go into each conversation and to go so you randomly do it. When we take the data and we understand all the data, and then we can understand the policy, and we understand the DNA of the company, and we understand all of that, then they can also answer in the same way that the company does. So it doesn't lose the identity. The opposite, it's optimized. Understand all of the DNA. We understand the company, and you can modify it. You can say, oh, you know, that's not my policy, actually, although in reality it is, because this is how your agent are acting. So, yeah.

Annie Holcombe  27:33  
So tell me about, tell me about the interfaces that you have at this point. You are you directly connected with any channels? Do you work with any channel managers, like, where are you at? Obviously, I'm asking from a next pack standpoint, you know, we want to come have a conversation. But what are you guys doing for distribution, for the property managers, 

Shahar Goldboim  27:53  
so distribution, we actually touching like a white label channel manager, where everything is done on boom. So in reality, you can connect to any OTA that you want, and we also have in our booking site, so you can also create yourself a booking site on boom. We touch all of that element to give the answer, very cool, very cool. And if a company was using a website that they did not want to get rid of, would boom, can boom still work with them? Yes. So we're working on all of that solution for the company. So in a week, we should be on and it shouldn't be a problem.

Alex Husner  28:43  
Yeah, interesting. Very cool. I think you guys are certainly on to something. And you know, there's so many PMS that are in the industry right now. I just heard of two more this morning that I've never even heard of before. But I feel like you know, a lot of them, the value proposition is kind of the same. I mean, if they've been around for a long time, that's kind of the value proposition is, they've been around for a long time, but, you know, that's in today's day and age. It's like, that's, that's not really what's going to get you ahead into that next level in business. So, I mean, it seems like, from the managers I've spoken to, that use, boom. They are all you know, very forward thinking company leaders that, you know, they they want something that's going to last for a long time, but that also is going to keep them, you know, ahead of the curve, and to be more more profitable, and, you know, make it a better environment for their people to work at, because they've got this tool that's, you know, really enabling them.

Shahar Goldboim  29:38  
Yeah, I think it's really important when you pick the partner that you want to be in is understand where they are today and where their vision is, because I would like to stay with the company for a long time. So, so what? What is your vision and what focusing that's a big part of picking. I think in the industry, you have two kinds. You have basically companies that is tech people that saying, hey, these guys will need that, and without understanding the whole ecosystem and how stuff are in reality, because it's really different when you look from up to down, but from down to up, it's a different view, right? So, so how you mitigate this? So this is one kind. Another kind is people that had five to 10 properties, and then they saying, hey, you know what? This will be a great solution. And they do have a great solution, but not for company scale, and this is why we have so many solution in the industry. And companies work on seven, eight different platform that create a lot of frustration from the team, because they need to move from one thing to another thing, different app, you have a lot of data, and also with the API integration. Yeah, you have an API integration, but it's not really a system. So they are connecting, they take few data and few data, but it's not creating, like the holistic system that we wanted to create.

Alex Husner  31:17  
Yeah? One other thing, seamless tech stack, then, yeah, yeah, exactly. Now I saw on your website that you've got Ian Carter, who is the former CEO of Hilton Worldwide, on your board of directors as the chairman. That's that's a pretty impressive person to have as part of this.

Shahar Goldboim  31:37  
Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I'm still, like I was honored by Ian joining us, and he really loved what we are doing, and I couldn't get a better guy to support us and being the chairman on the board. So I'm really, really honored that he believes in the idea, and and I love talking with him, and he opened my mind. And, yeah, I'm talking with him a lot. 

Annie Holcombe  32:09  
It's great to have somebody from that level of hospitality who's kind of seen the business now, not necessarily the vacation rental side of the business, but hospitality in general, like he gets it. So that's that's certainly a big boom for you.

Shahar Goldboim  32:25  
Is, is? It's ridiculous. He was head of G he was head of Filton is a chairman of Switzerland Watch Company, which is a NASDAQ company Italy service pro Formula One. It was director in Burberry, and he basically touched the manufacturer, service and fashion industry and everything from top level. So to talk with somebody like that is really open the mind in so many level that Taylor, the interaction with him, and he's a cool guy.

Annie Holcombe  33:07  
That's another that's a nice bonus, too. Yeah, so what's, what's next for? Boom, where do you so you've, I mean, you've been around for a little bit, so you've been testing the waters and talking to customers and working through it, and obviously this big announcement being the first AI, PMS, where do you go from here?

Shahar Goldboim  33:25  
Lots of world domination. They go exactly all the way up.

We call Boom, boom real estate, but, but in Yeah, but in reality is, is create value for me is, how can I create value to the people that we're working with we're looking at long term, I want to be focused on the vacation rental market and create the best system for property managers to use in order to create a win, win win situation the guests will get a better experience, and as a result, ADR and occupancy will be higher. For property manager companies to be more profitable and to create more scalability, because for property manager companies, the margins are low on what they're making. And how can we take a payroll that is $100,000 making it $40,000 so they will have more money to invest in the guest experience, if it makes sense, creating more scalability for them. And on the other hand, like on the investor side, owner side, create a better return for their investment and win, win, win for everybody to own the ecosystem.

Alex Husner  34:50  
I was talking to a manager in Florida earlier this week that when in 30 A which is, you know, super high end luxury market. But I. On Saturday, turn days, when an arrival comes in, they meet them at the house and they either have key lime pie or they do like a fruit salad and lemonade. They're always dropping off something that's just like a really nice, welcome gift. And I think in my mind, where I see, boom, being able to help is, you know, those people that you know, if they had to be at the office answering these emails and these inquiries in the phone and all these different things that they've got going on. You know, they don't have time to be able to go out and provide that level of, you know, unreasonable hospitality, as we all talk about, but that's possible, you know. I mean, take your good people, don't they can you don't got to let them go, but let them work on things that are going to really define the company, and, you know, solidify you as a leader in the market, and let the other stuff become automated to a certain extent, 

Shahar Goldboim  35:48  
1,000% that's, that's, that's what you want to do, is to create an amazing experience. And it's really hard when you have so many tests and you need to be master of so many stuff, like you need to do construction and design and maintenance and cleaning and to do marketing and to do sell and to do owner acquisition and to touch the guests in a certain thing and to be with the owner. And how do you master all of that? It's really hard. Yeah, in the end of the day, what we want to create is relations, and we want to create the human touch, and we want to be able to create this amazing experience to the tourists that are coming and why we take the workload down, then we can really focus on the important stuff. 

Annie Holcombe  36:38  
Yeah, I talk about all the time. People in this industry that are really passionate and love it, they have a hospitality gene, and you either have it or you don't. But I think the thing that that gets lost in it is people that have the gene get burnt out on all of these tasks and all of these things, the minutia of running the business, and so now this allows them to do like exactly what they want to do, to be hospitable, to be out there, to be with the guests, to be interacting with the owners, those type of things that really make the whole experience of being in this industry, what it's all about being fun and creating memories, lasting memories, and being part of things. So this is this is tremendous. I think what you're doing is just got so much runway to grow, I know of a lot of people that are looking for PMS is right now they're entertaining, trying to find lighter tech stacks, things that don't have so many things, and also maybe some things that don't have so many rules and restrictions about how they operated. And I think with an AI component, it allows them to customize it the way their business needs to operate, not the way the PMs company says they should operate. So you're this is, this is great, and I can't wait to see all of it in action and kind of see where you guys go by the time or next year, celebrating your one year anniversary of this announcement,

Alex Husner  37:58  
I will, yeah, I would love to, I think that we'll keep everybody in shock with the stuff that we are planning. Yeah, very cool. Now this is, this is a question as our last one that Annie typically asked, but I'm going to go ahead and ask it today. But what's one thing that's not being talked about enough in the industry? In your mind,

Shahar Goldboim  38:20  
I think that everybody talk about regulations, but not in a way to how we can solve stuff like we see what happening in Europe, we see what happening in Barcelona. And how do we as an industry create the amazing story that we have? How do we pull out all of the tourists and how we push everything into social media, because when we think about our industry now, what about the impacts that we have? So let's say I have a hotel in in Barcelona, and and I went with my family to to Barcelona, and it's really hard to find like in hotels that have a place for four or like five people, and this accommodation allowing it, additional to it the spread of the of the of the money, let's say, like, if you have hotel, you have a zone for hotel, meaning that all of the city doesn't enjoy for tourism, just a specific part. When we're looking at vacation rentals, spread of the money is around all of the city. And we are doing so many good stuff, and we are we have, like, let's say we have around 8 million listings around the world. Probably five and a half million is like, for non professional to 2.2 is around professional what I'm trying to say that we have around 4 million hosts that we we have around 50 million that supporting the the industry. And then we have all of the workers that are working, if it's cleaning, repair, people that. At the blue color people that enjoying from that industry. So we have around probably 100 and 50 million to 200 million that specifically working in that industry. Now everybody have like 10 to 20 friends. So we're talking about people that can touch around 2 billion people. And how we take the beautiful thing that we're doing from an industry and putting it out to social media where everybody can touch. Because regulation is great, meaning regulation is needed because vacation rental creating more noise and creating more trash, and it starts it needs to be touched. For example, Ken monkey did an amazing business touching on the on the trash issue. But in reality, for example, in design VR, we did during Corona time, I had to do it. We need to add a guard, 24/7, so I created a security team that actually we maintain after it, because we don't want to create noise awareness, noise and all of that stuff when we have issues. So we have, like, the third security going into places. What I'm trying to say, when you have a weakness, you can create solution. So the company, for example, in Miami, that I can pay them $100 per property, and they will do a security as a result, and they can get many properties as a result. So we have a problem with solving it, and we don't put it on the police in order to go in. So in few levels, we need to be able to tell the story out of the amazing story we're creating, and we need to create through a conversation, stuff that will solve problems that we are creating, and a lot of time, what happening is that we are not talking as a whole ecosystem, meaning the OTA or the OTA, the tech people are the tech people, the property management are the property management. But in the end of the day, it's one ecosystem that everybody enjoying from it. And now we can create a board that is from an OTA technology company, property maintenance company, cleaning company, and understand all of the suffering and how we can answer stuff. I answer right?

Alex Husner  42:27  
Yeah, no. I love I love that, yeah. And thinking of it from that perspective of, like, you know, creating a board around this. I mean, not vrma, but I mean, like, a true organization that is just focused on this, but that has those people seated at the table to bring what they're hearing and, you know, what their ideas are, and just have that kind of, like, think, take, Think Tank kind of mentality around it. Because really, at the end of the day, I mean, you think about it, you go stay in a hotel, and I mean, you normally, you do have to show your ID when you check in, but they're not, they're not doing background checks on you or anything. I mean, like, vacation rentals are going significantly further in that direction to do background checks in a lot of cases. You know that the noise awareness, you know, noise aware type devices, I mean, all the different things that can monkey the different services that already have come out in our industry. I've been, you know, I think, you know, we're all trying to figure we're all trying to solve the problem, and there are solutions. But it's like, it still bubbles back to the awareness issue of, like, do legislators, do they really know that this is we are using these types of tools, and that things aren't that bad? Or, like, where are they getting their main information from to make these decisions that they need to be banned or, you know, strictly regulated, and unfortunately, at the end of the day too. I think a lot of that is a lot of pressure from the hotel regulations that they, of course, would rather see this happen, but it's tough. And I think, you know, some sort of a conglomerate there to help with this would probably be a great thing. I mean, there's rent responsibly, of course, they do an amazing job, and, you know, a couple others, but maybe there needs to be, like a fresh take on it. 

Shahar Goldboim  44:04  
Yeah, totally. Like a few stuff so, so, so basically, in matter of I had few stuff that I wanted to say, but in reality, a lot of time when you have like policy makers, is not about real data, it's how they using the data. So for example, Barcelona have 10,000 licenses for vacation rental. They doing a push on that, but they have 60,000 apartments sitting empty, and they push on the vacation rental for no reason whatsoever. It just like in order to get more votes and stuff like that. So it's not necessarily that, and we need to touch on the people. When you look at Barcelona, number one, economy growth like number one, i. Business is tourism. So let's say, if you left tourism, yeah, the apartment cost less, but you're doing less money. How does it help? So I really don't understand it. So it's, it's how you using all of that so well, 

Annie Holcombe  45:16  
I think also too, and this is probably where, this your, your system could help out is that communication of the owner, because the vast majority of owners don't have a vote in their the community where their rental is. They don't live there, and so a lot of times it's the people that live there that get annoyed by one rental, and all of a sudden it becomes the most pervasive problem in the community. So the municipality leaders are listening to that person who's been screaming at them every single day, whereas, if you know this is going on and you can communicate this out to your owners quickly, succinctly and clearly, then they can also voice their you know, be active. And I think that's where everybody's been challenged, is, how do we get everybody active in it, and have the right information to to react to, instead of like being things being visceral and emotional and overreacting 

Shahar Goldboim  46:09  
100% 100% and also, how do you create a beautiful story, and not just the horrible story, and we have much more beautiful stories and horrible story, and how do you use social media in order to push it out? And that's why I mentioned that we have 2 billion people that we can touch from the industry if we recreate this material, because in the end of the day in New York, they cancel vacation rental. Everybody's suffering from it. Yeah, maybe it doesn't make money, the PMs and the pricing algorithm, whoever doesn't make money, the property manager, are not doing it. So it's hurting all of the ecosystem, and now as an ecosystem, we can create this beautiful story out that will show what a beautiful thing vacation rental is

Annie Holcombe  47:01  
 I love that. I don't think I've ever heard anybody say that we have a beautiful story to tell, but we do. I like you putting it that way, and I think it goes back to something that Alex and I talk with a lot of people about, is that that abundance mindset, if you realize that we can all coexist, instead of saying it's got to be mine, or it's got to be yours, and fighting for it, things will be much more harmonious. 

Shahar Goldboim  47:25  
And we do a beautiful story, we are all together in it, and that's why I don't like organizations saying, hey, you know, just property manager or just this, we are all one ecosystem, and everybody's supporting everybody.

Alex Husner  47:41  
Yeah, everyone exists, right? Everybody is together, yeah? Because at the end of the day, I mean, even if it's, it is the hotels that are fine trying to ban short term rentals in areas. It's like, you know, we're already seeing this in New York that we just had the ladies from roar on, roar on. And, you know, people, if, if you've gotten used to staying in short term rentals over the last few years, since the covid Boom, of them, you're not just going to say, Okay, well, I'm just going to stay in a hotel then. I mean, in some cases, maybe you do, but you're going to look at another destination, and the destination is the one that hurts from from that the most. So it's like, you can't pretend like short term rentals Don't, don't, aren't, aren't there? Just force them out. It's not the answer. And I just, I think most destinations understand that, but there's just so much pressure that's coming down on them that they're having to make decisions that don't really make sense. A lot of cases,

Shahar Goldboim  48:36  
 true, true. It's not the diminishing you can create regulation. And regulation is a good thing, meaning, like, we want to be more professional industry, we want to do that. Yeah,

Annie Holcombe  48:50  
absolutely. Well, Shahar, thank you so very much for all this information. I can't wait to see it in person again. I've done the little demo, but I'm going to get to see it all really soon, so I'm really excited about that. But if anybody wants to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to reach you? 

Shahar Goldboim  49:06  
Honestly, LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the best platform they can write me a message. I'm really responsive over there. I was on get a million message, but they always perfect so, 

Alex Husner  49:21  
and the website is boom now.com so people can go there and schedule a demo if they want to see more. And of course, see you this this fall at pretty much all the shows. Sounds like

Shahar Goldboim  49:38  
awesome. I really enjoy actually meeting everybody. I really enjoy talking with everybody. Yeah, I love this show. Yeah,

Alex Husner  49:49  
it's gonna be good. Well, if anybody wants to get in touch with Annie and I you can go to alexandanypodcast.com and until next time, thanks for tuning in, everybody. Bye.