Mastering Owner Acquisition and Growth Strategies with Rentalz’ Larry Hoffer

Alex Husner  0:00  
Welcome to Alex & Annie, the real woman of vacation rentals. I'm Alex,

Annie Holcombe  0:03  
and I'm Annie, and

Alex Husner  0:04  
we are joined today with Larry Hoffer, who is the CEO of the Rentalz company. Larry, it's so great to see you today.

Larry Hoffer  0:11  
Great to see you guys again, too, and happy. I call this the first day of the year because it's right after Labor Day. We're kicking into planning season.

Alex Husner  0:19  
Yeah,

Annie Holcombe  0:20  
we sure are. It's conference season, so hopefully we're gonna see you guys at some conferences. But for anybody that doesn't know Larry Hoffer and Rentalz, which I cannot believe there is a soul out there that you haven't talked to, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to Rentalz.

Larry Hoffer  0:35  
Fantastic. So about 21 years ago, I fell into the vacation rental business because I own a place up in Vail, Colorado. I was renting it out pretty well, and I made a mistake, and I double booked my own home as a single owner. And I'm sure I'm not the only person on this podcast who's ever dealt with a double booking. And out of necessity, I called my neighbor and say, Hey, I got a double booking with you. I know you don't rent your home. Can I put my guest into your home and I'll rent it. I'll take care of it. He said, Sure, and so I'll even pay a 15% commission. Said, really. And I had this idea that maybe there was a business there. And sure enough, I started a business in Vail in 2003 we expanded to Aspen throughout the Rocky Mountain region, and we did, oh, 10, many, many, 10s of millions of dollars of bookings operate vacation rental businesses in the Rocky Mountain region. Wasn't a franchise operation, but as a multi location operation, where we developed systems and services, primarily in the Rocky Mountain region, where we put, you know, a lot of miles under our feet to figure out how to be in this business. And then about six years ago, said, You know what, there's a bigger opportunity here. So we created the rentalz company to provide growth solutions for property managers throughout North America,

Alex Husner  1:54  
right? Well, it's a very succinct but interesting story. And I think how a lot of people that have come on or moved over to the supplier or vendor side, kind of started similar to that, right? And they saw a need and developed something that, you know, could really be used within the marketplace. But it's been great watching owner point and rentalz company and contact point and all the products that you have really expand. And, you know, feel like we see you at all the shows now and your team and just talk to so many clients that use your services. And I know for several of my personal clients, they use all of the rentalz products as well. So fun to have somebody on that. Actually, I have some experience working with no,

Larry Hoffer  2:31  
it's great. It's we have lots of very happy customers. In fact, you mentioned the trade shows. We became a silver sponsor of vrma. We're a sponsor of VR nation. We are at the streamline conference as a gold sponsor. We are the title sponsor for the hostaway conference this year. It's their first one hostel in Miami. Because we find our conference is a really, really good way to meet face to face with customers, and, of course, track and whoever else I forgot, oh, in DARM for coming back again in DARM as a goal for gold or platinum sponsor at DARM as well. So we like to see people there, but we also have ways of meet reaching people who don't actually go to trade shows. Because, you know, a lot of people, Alex, any of them, a lot of people who don't go to trade shows, they use you and other channels for staying in touch with people in the industry.

Annie Holcombe  3:20  
Yeah. And we're excited to announce that you are coming on as a premier brand sponsor of the Alex and Annie podcast. So that is super exciting. You're sponsoring all the things, and we're just grateful that you decided to bring us into that loop.

Larry Hoffer  3:34  
This was a really easy decision to sponsor. No, it's like, you talk to the right people, and you know, you you understand it, you get what's going on more than anyone else we've come across in the industry.

Annie Holcombe  3:46  
Oh, we appreciate that.

Alex Husner  3:48  
So let's dive in a little bit into the company and the different brands and some of the services that you have. I don't know where you think is going to be the best place to start, but methodically, as you're explaining what they are, where would you begin?

Larry Hoffer  4:01  
So first of all, the company is the rentalz company, and we provide breakthrough growth solutions. So we look at growth. They're all about growth. There are great other services out there. If you want to focus on accounting or rate optimization, that's not us. We focus on growth. So we have two pillars of our business. One is our booking solutions. So we have rentalz.com which is a booking platform that helps drive we call them direct bookings. They are quasi direct bookings. They are booking directly with with the property manager. And 100% of the inventory is professionally managed. We don't do any host stuff or rent by owner. It's all professionally managed inventory, and we have sub brands underneath that. We have deluxury, which is our super premium brand the top two or 3% of all properties. And we also have take pause, which is the only booking platform in the industry that is dog friendly and professionally managed. So when a property manager chooses to put. Their properties on rentalz.com their premium properties are onto luxury. Their pet friendly properties are on take pause, and that is free to list, and the property manager is the merchant of record, and that's our booking side of the platform. We'll get to some of the details later, but the other side is our software suite, and they meld together into one big Zco system, as we call it, of everything we offer now, our software suite, our flagship product, is owner point. Owner point has become the number one owner acquisition platform the industry. Eight of the 10 largest property management companies are using owner point. We have hundreds and hundreds of users on the platform, and we're watching exponential growth online, tremendous growth from all of our for the vast majority of our clients are using owner point to help them grow their inventory. So owner point is an owner growth platform, and what sets it apart from anything else is we start with the property data. I know, Alex, you've gotten into the weeds with owner point. And what sets us apart is you literally can go and we have into the data and see every single residential property the United States updated monthly. Maybe we have 315, fields of data, 15 data sources to allow you to commence your marketing. And owner point is a data platform, and it's a marketing services and it's a complete solution to help you grow so that's and that's owner point, and I think you're both familiar with that. The next amazing product we have is called contact point. It's a CRM and marketing hub that integrates with owner point. Not everyone needs a CRM and marketing hub. Some people might be very happy using Salesforce or HubSpot or some other solutions that are out there so they don't need it. And as good as most of the pmss are, pmss are not CRMs. The best ones have great lead management systems, but they're not a full customer relations management solution. So contact point is our CRM and marketing hub that integrates in with owner point to allow you to do marketing, direct mail, phone outreach, SMS outreach, full landing pages, and that is an optional standalone service called contact point. And it works great. What's really worked well, and we hit a pain point, and we did it almost by accident with a product we have called answerpoint, and that's an overflow overflow call handling solution that we launched almost by accident two years ago and turned out to be one most popular products. And we do 10s of 1000s of calls a month for overflow call solutions. And answer point is evolved into a full telecommunications platform. So this is all part of our suite of services, owner point, contact point and answer point, and then coming up this fall, and we're launching it at the DARM conference. It's in beta testing now. Is travel point, which is our customer data platform that allows you to house all of your customer records in one centralized hub to allow you to have full insight into all of your customer data, and then use contact point for outreach, and we'll be glad to we're really, really excited about getting out of beta and live but one of the things we're really so pleased with is we were the first company to launch AI for property managers. So we created the genie brand, J, I, N, i, which is an AI solution, custom designed for vacation rental managers, everything from creating your listings, review responders, writing blog posts, creating all your content, is all built into Genie. And the best part about Genie is we give it away when you have some of any of our other products. So you sign up for our products, for SaaS products, we give you Genie AI, so it all wraps together. All focused on growth, and we have an amazing development team and support team that puts it all together. You've

Annie Holcombe  8:53  
covered all the bases, I think, daresay, all the ones that are the most challenging for people outside their PMS. I think it's great. How many employees do you guys have now?

Larry Hoffer  9:02  
We have 20 people in the team. So we have 20 people. There are a handful of we're based in Denver, Colorado. The core of our team is here in Denver, but we have people from coast to coast, and we have a handful of people overseas as well who are part of our team working full time in us hours.

Alex Husner  9:19  
Yeah, wow. I remember one of the most challenging things when I was here in the Myrtle Beach market with condo world was when we were doing our solicitations for homeowners. At that point, these types of solutions, they just weren't out there. So we had to go to tax records to try and get addresses of people, and it was a painstaking process. And then you have to make sure you remove the owners from it. And it was just, every time we went to do a homeowner acquisition initiative, it just getting those lists was just really, really a pain. And I think one of the things I love about what you've done with owner point is that it you put the property manager basically back in the driver's seat, that they can go in there, and they can pull any multitude of ways of looking at that data by whether. It's the location, whether it's the bedroom size, whether it's the price of the home, any of those things, and pull their own reports so they're in charge of it. And I think that's really powerful, because then they can take those lists and turn them into their own marketing campaigns, or they can use the services that you provide. But I like that flexibility, and I think it's it's good to have options for both sides. So really cool.

Larry Hoffer  10:23  
It's having the data at your fingertip is the key. And it's actually interesting. You asked me how I started my company. When I first started the company, I went and got Eagle County, Colorado's files. This is 21 years ago, in an Excel file, and this will sound familiar to you of what you did before? Yeah, yeah. That was my first owner acquisition campaign. Was 21 years ago, and it was all literally printing out labels and doing it all, and how far we've come from that to literally being able to click, click, click, get your list. And also you're probably aware we're also able to identify homeowners who list their home on VRBO, so we can target those as well. Or we could even target people with high mortgage balances, because you'll know they'd have expenses and they want to generate more rental income.

Annie Holcombe  11:10  
That's That's amazing, because Alex is right. I remember when I was doing it, it was just, you'd run the report, put it over to an Excel, clean it up, put it in labels, manually, label everything, and then you would just put it out there and hope for the best, right? Yeah, exactly. Had the right person, and it wasn't under some other LLC, somewhere else. So you were talking about some of the data and how people can analyze going after certain markets and those type of things, do you connect to a data source, like a key data, or any of the other analytical systems that are out there?

Larry Hoffer  11:38  
We don't most of our clients are using key data. They use that for understanding that we're building their profiles. It works really, really well. We have a phenomenal partnership with key data, but we deliberately let our clients have their relation with key data to analyze it so they could build their lists and their profiles. They don't know if on the north side of the tracks, on properties over four bedrooms, do well. So they do that?

Alex Husner  12:00  
Yeah, super interesting. So I mean, talking about best practices for homeowner acquisition, I know I get asked this all the time, and you know my response is, you have to be consistent. One that's kind of the starting point. Yeah, you have to be consistent. You have to have a strategy. But what are some things that you've seen that your clients do that have just been really successful in getting those to turn into leads, and I asked that also with the question of getting your clients to understand that, you know, getting one customer off of a mailing the lifetime value of that customer, it's very different than trying to go fishing for bookings. I mean, phishing is as a much higher value at the end of the day, but it has to be looked at very differently from an ROI perspective.

Larry Hoffer  12:41  
So this is and you asked a little bit about my background, which I didn't share with you. Before I started the company, I was in the cable television business, and we had subscribers, and I learned about subscriber life and customer value and the churn rates and everything else. So I grew up when I was really young, understanding these concept of what the core is. So the most important thing any vacation rental manager needs to do is figure out which type of properties they would like to have, and figure that out first and how many you want. Some people are totally fine with 30 properties that do a half a million dollars each year, and that works for them. So the first thing you do is figure out what you want and what type of property you want and what type of owner you want to have. We have some some of our clients only want people who don't use them pure investment properties, and that's what they choose to have. Other people love the people who use it part time. So figure that part out first. But it comes down to the value of a customer. Ask yourself also, what percentage of my customers and my homeowners do I lose every year either? The answer, I'll tell you right now, it isn't zero. You do lose customers. They do sell, they do die. That will happen if you're in business long enough, you will lose customers. It's often to death, divorce, or they're tired of using the properties. One of those things is why you use it, not because of you in general, in general, in the industry, you will lose on average, eight to 10% of your customers every year if you stay in business long enough. It's going to happen for whatever reason. So when that happens, that means you're losing and I'll use them. I'll use the math. Let's use 10% of your customers every year. That means, on average, the inverse of your churn, what you lose is customer life or subscriber life or customer life. So if you have 100 properties and you lose 10% of your properties, an average homeowner will stay with you. On average 10 years. Some will stay 20. Some will do five. But on average, you're going to have someone stay with you for 10 years on average. When that happens, then you ask your next question, how much does an average property do per year? And it varies by market, but I'll use $75,000 a year. That covers plenty of markets. So if an average property is doing $75,000 a year, and let's say you're 20% commission, that means you're getting. And $15,000 a year in commission income from that one single property. So 75,000 times 20 is $15,000 and if they're staying with you for 10 years, that's $150,000 in commission income over the next 10 years. That's simple math. You can even do that without a calculator. Now, when you take the present value of that, it's probably worth about $75,000 so and I'll never forget this, Alex and Annie, when I had my first business in Vail, I remember walking into a property right on the creek in the center of Vail Village. Today it's probably a $7 million condo. Wasn't back then I walked into the property, and I actually went, woohoo, because if you land that property, that does that property today, I'm sure does $200,000 a year, whoever's managing it now, at 20% commission, that's making you a lot of money. And you maintain that relationship. Every property you add is worth a lot of money, both as an asset, future cash value, and what's the going rate on contracts right now, you guys are on top of this. When people are selling their companies, are they say, What? 25, $30,000 contract? I think

Annie Holcombe  16:14  
it's come down quite a bit. I know when I was doing it, it was between five and seven, but we were doing a lot of like condo contracts. I think it last time I saw was like a little right around 20, but I know that there was some larger multiples that had been paid two years ago. So, yeah, yeah,

Larry Hoffer  16:29  
yeah, so. But even if you take the present value, the lifetime value of that customer, it's worth $150,000 over 10 years, net present value is roughly 75,000 and you could sell it in your company for probably 20,000 to another company these days, depending on the market. And to get a customer, it'll cost you 234, $1,000 sometimes more in total expense to get a customer, because they don't fall off the trees. You both know that very well.

Alex Husner  16:57  
Yeah, no, it's spot on. And just a really important equation, I think, for people to be thinking about as they're planning out their homeowner marketing. I mean, as far as the consistency with my clients, we're doing one a month, typically 10 months out of the year. So there might be a couple months that we're not doing, but is that what you also suggest as

Larry Hoffer  17:15  
absolutely, it's a you never stop, ever, and it's 10 times a year. In terms of direct mail, our ideal recommended campaign is never stop. Use 10 direct mail pieces a year. Do email marketing throughout the year. Do digital marketing throughout the year to support your messaging. And we highly recommend phone outreach if you have it's not easy, but getting on the phone and calling people, of course, one of the most important part is you're networking with real estate agents in the community, and marketing to them is one of your biggest constituency. But the key to this, the biggest you asked about the best practices. The best practice is, cut your list down by two thirds. Focus on who you really want to get throw away the waste. So by throwing away the waste allows you to focus on the best, juiciest, best properties you want, and focus on them for your secondary properties, you can do a little bit less. Let's say you're not as interested in condos below half million dollars, but you're you'd be willing to take it, spend a little bit less against those but never stop ongoing. Be consistent with your brand message. Point out what your differentiators are, what sets you apart from anyone else in your market, and put a face to the business and sell what's what you do best and never, ever stop. And you know what it pays. It works. It almost always works.

Annie Holcombe  18:41  
Do you recommend that they have an offer when they go out there to the owners, or do you get that granular with your customers to help them? It depends. Figure out what that plan looks like.

Larry Hoffer  18:50  
One of the things I've seen that works best is upgrading their home, okay, which means putting in electronic locks, better, Wi Fi, stuff like that. And when you do that one, it helps. You're going to do it anyway because you want electronic locks. And that does resonate with people. It varies by market. Well, actually, what we do, and many of our customers do this to set them apart, is do something that your competitors can't do. So one of the products I didn't mention earlier is called home sites, where you could provide something different than no one else does, which is building your own single property website for their property to set it apart, put a focus on their home, and build Alex's getaway.com or beachside views.com and set that apart, because most of your competition won't do that, so it sets you apart. But upgrading in terms of hardware, deep cleans, one of the things might do you cited for us, we've seen complimentary deep cleans as part of it, which you absorb as part of the expense, is some of the things we've seen work well, but we don't dictate mess. Managing for our clients, we follow their leads, we have recommendations, but do things that sets them apart. Yeah,

Alex Husner  20:05  
I think really understanding the personas of the types of homeowners that you're trying to bring onto your program is really an important part, too. And this is actually something that I'm rolling out with my clients now that I'm interviewing a handful of their homeowners, a handful of their guests, and we're really building out those personas, and then, you know, strategically using the messaging to address those, those pain points that they have. Because, I mean, these interviews have been eye opening so far that it's like sometimes a company might say, well, we're the biggest, we're the this, we're the that, we're the oldest. We've been here forever, and maybe a couple things that maybe differentiate them, but none of those things are the things that the homeowner or the guests, that is why they booked with them, like there's emotion behind this. And in a lot of cases, with property management, you get a lot of homeowners that if they're on another rental program, they're frustrated because there's no transparency in their owner statements, and they don't know what's going on at the property. And last time they visited, it wasn't in good condition. It's like, you start outlining these things and then you base your messaging based on that. And that's that's my experience been very effective.

Larry Hoffer  21:06  
Yeah, I totally agree. And part of that is with your messaging, using the power of the data to customize the messaging. So for example, targeting a homeowner in Knoxville who has a place in Pigeon Forge is very different than someone who lives in Chicago who owns a place in Pigeon Forge, they're not using it on the weekends as much they may have purchased it. For people who are second homeowners, who use it a lot, is a different message. And when I started my business in Vail, we targeted the people in Denver who said, you know, let's rent your place where you're not using it when you have $3 million million dollar homes that sit idle, monetize it, you do just fine renting it six weeks a year when they're not using it. So customize the messaging is really, really important, and also resonate with how long they've owned the home is a different message. I know a lot of companies don't even target people who've owned the homes more than 20 years, they're not going to change. They're set in their ways. And I sometimes wonder, in markets like the Outer Banks, where you have people multi generational homes, how you get people to shift from one coming to the other? So you have to change your messaging on this so it really varies, versus the market, the owner and with our when you have access to the data, you get to customize the messaging, Alex, in your campaigns, did you go through and even customize down to the neighborhood name, so all the messaging would reference the actual neighborhood they

Alex Husner  22:31  
were in. The next one that we do is going to have that, this first one that we did, our first postcard. Part of it was just really to get the brand out there. But yeah, that's that's definitely something that we're going to be doing going forward, because I think you know, and especially when you can do it at scale, that was always kind of the hard part before too of not only the list, but the creative if you're doing completely different designs, but I think you know, being able to utilize what you're talking about more in some of the letters that are written that you know it's, it's not like you're having to have five different postcards Designed for this. You're manipulating the data within the letter, which is

Larry Hoffer  23:03  
easier. We've noticed if you get an email like, dear Whispering Pines town homeowner, or the letter says whispering times townhome owner, that resonates, versus Myrtle Beach Condo, yeah,

Alex Husner  23:13  
yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cuz, well, and because, every homeowner thinks that their property is the best, right? So it's like, you turned out, you

Larry Hoffer  23:21  
know why they're actually right? Yeah.

Annie Holcombe  23:26  
It is for them. It is absolutely, yeah, yeah. So tell me more about the AI. So I'm like, cautiously optimistic about how I've used it a little bit. And I've been, like, on, say, on the victim side of AI being thrown at me from, like, sales stuff. I put something up on LinkedIn today about it not a bad thing. I think it's a great tool, and I think it helps you do some of the grunt work that you need to do, like to do research and those type of things. But tell us how you guys are going to utilize AI, and like, what your suggestions are. Because I think that one thing that some people are leaning into is they think that AI is going to solve all the communication problems, that they're not going to have to have a human behind it, which, what I've seen so far, you've got to have a human behind it, because it's not necessarily learning proper ways to speak and and the lingo of the industry. So what are you guys doing with it, and what should we look forward to from it?

Larry Hoffer  24:15  
Absolutely, I totally agree. First of all, we're a high touch company. We don't believe in a lot of AI. And I have some friends in the industry who have aI communication tools. I'm sure they're fine for certain things. We've created two main tools of AI. One is called Genie for property managers. It's a tool. It's layered on top of it's over multiple machine learning models, including chatgpt, but highly customized to be accessible, to allow a vacation rental manager front end staff to understand how to use it. To improve the listings, to be more descriptive, to rewrite your descriptive does things you can't do with chat GPT. You can take a property listing from your website, paste it in and say, Please rewrite. Make it. Concise and more compelling to meet the needs of Airbnb listing, and it'll rewrite your listing for that. Now, number one rule in AI is always read the output and edit it and approve it, because it's often not accurate that you have to do that, but it makes things pretty darn good for doing listings blog posts. Most your clients don't do enough blog post or update their websites. We don't even do it enough, and I have a full marketing team. So for example, if you want to do a blog post on the Telluride dome festival, you could easily take the website for Telluride jazz, paste it into Genie AI, give it directions on how to write a blog post. It'll read the content, write it, put it out to you and then turn around and allow you to post it without taking, you know, hiring a whole marketing team and do it and say, Why did I just spend $300 when you can bang through that and do it yourself? I'm not the biggest believer or embracer of all of the communication through AI, it's great for a certain level, but I we're our business, even with our answer point phone system, we have live US based phone reps answering calls, because when you're dealing with a guest and an owner, I find that just too valuable to trust other sources. That's my personal opinion. That's not to dis other people have great solutions for certain solutions that are solved, I just look at the value of a homeowner to a property manager or the value of a guest. And I, I'm personally the belief that do more by high touch, but when it comes to creating content now, we have also have an AI trip planner that property manager can put on their website. And you can go and ask Jeannie how to plan a trip to Park City, and it'll give you ideas on how to plan a trip to Park City for what you like to do, whether you like adventure or skiing or snowboarding or dining. And it'll give you a whole itinerary on how to plan a trip. And it also redirects you to properties that meet your needs. So that's how we use it for suggestions, and that, by the way, that ask Genie is totally free for every single property manager who distributes their properties on rentalz.com they can add ask genie to their website for free, and it helps. I remember one property manager in Lake Tahoe said, Oh, my God, I don't have to answer these phone calls of, what do I do with my kids when I'm in Lake Tahoe? They give them an AI tool to help plan a trip. That's my opinion. Yeah, that's, yeah.

Alex Husner  27:20  
That's an interesting way of doing it, too. And what does it look like on the website? Is it just like a bar?

Larry Hoffer  27:25  
Can I do this right now? Share it or not? Yeah, sure. We've

Alex Husner  27:28  
actually never done that on the show. But, and if you're just listening and not on YouTube, you probably want to switch over to YouTube. And what is the URL for anybody who's just listening? Okay,

Larry Hoffer  27:38  
vacation rentals, Park City. So moose management is one of the leading property management companies in Park City. This is their site. And if you look down here in the lower right, you see ask Genie. So here I enter the dates. You now see it from some dates over here, fine dining, adventure, indoor arts and science, not the Olympics. Sightseeing. See all the nightlife, luxury to women, business partners, looking for fun in Park City. And you see those dates, and all you do is you click here, and it's generating the results right here with some ideas on what you're doing in your Park City. See that? Yeah, I love it. But if it doesn't lead to bookings, why do it right, right, even at a summary. So over here, I'm going to say, You know what? Let's summarize this by list, by categories. It's now telling you what to do, and what are some of locals favorite restaurants. And here they are, just like that. But again, if it doesn't lead to bookings, so watch what happens here. Find Park City vacation homes, and here are the homes that are all available for those dates that met the needs. How do you like that? That's great. So it's all built in. This is totally free for any property manager watching this right now. If you distribute your properties on rentalz.com we will give you ask Genie for free. That's not even an Annie and Alex special. That's our offer for all rentalz customers. We have other specials for you. I

Alex Husner  29:14  
don't believe that we're utilizing it on my client's sites yet, but I definitely want to try this and see how it works. I think it's great. I'm curious, though, you mentioned about, you know, how Genie works, and that if you went to chat GPT, you wouldn't get the same responses. And I'm sure you built this as, like a custom GPT. But what goes into that? I mean, like, I know, for my own use of chat GPT, the more that I use it, the better the responses it gets, because it's learning you. But how do you program something like that in the background that is specific to travel. So

Larry Hoffer  29:43  
it's interesting. We prompted, we had one of our senior developers, is very, very good at prompt engineering, wrote a whole bunch of stuff that guided you down this journey. And this is for the interactive one for the guest. I remember showing this to some people. I said, Wow, is that like AI? Said, yes, no, this is AI. It's not. Like AI is AI. So we have trained it. We have people doing it for vacation rental planning. You'll notice when you do that, when it makes recommendations, first thing, get to your vacation home rented through moose management. So it's all prompted for that. It doesn't say stay in your hotel, for example. So we prompted it like that, and it all is geared and we also have the back end our customers, our clients and partners can go in and say, recommend this restaurant, recommend this ski shop, recommend this place, so they can customize it. And you can even train it so it's giving the results for ask. That's for Ask Genie for the customer, for the back end, for working it yourself. We've customized Genie for property managers to be exactly for the industry, I will say, if someone is very tech savvy and wants to get a chat GPT themselves and wants to do own custom programming, that's a good solution. But again, we have Genie as basically, it's free if you're using any of our other software services, and it's accessible. I'm sure a lot of people listening are looking at some of their team members are saying, There's no way I can get, you know, Bob to go into chat. GPT, he'll never get it. But we designed genie to make it easy for Kylie, Bob to go in and do it. Sorry to all guys,

Alex Husner  31:15  
exactly. I think it's great. I love it. And so it's amazing to see how AI is, you know, slowly and now more quickly, being adopted within our industry, and just really simplifying things quite a bit, really cool stuff. Larry, one more question before we need to wrap up. But what about kind of going back on the on the owner point side of things? I know you also help property managers when they're dealing with realtors, right and when they're doing absolutely projections and things. Can you tell a little bit about how that helps realtors. Absolutely.

Larry Hoffer  31:42  
First of all, everyone knows the whole world for real estate agents has changed in the past couple months, and it's been much, much more competitive in general. So real estate agents are fighting for listings more than ever before. So one of the things that when a property is put up for sale, you want to be out there talking to the real estate agent who has the listing saying, I, as a third party, independent person, will be glad to put together a rental projection for that property. So that way, when you have a prospective buyer, you will have third party data to say, Yes, this property will generate this much in income over the course of the year, and so you are giving it to real estate agents, for them to show to their clients, to be a more compelling sale, for them to justify a sales price. And as a real estate agent in virtually every I'm sure everywhere, is not allowed to give rental projections. They're allowed to share historical data, and they're allowed to share third party data, but they can't say this property is going to do, you know, 200,000

Alex Husner  32:46  
they're not allowed, yeah, and sadly, a lot are, you know, I mean, we talk about this on the show all the time, that there's just so much bad data and information being shared with prospective buyers that sets the relationship up to fail when The property manager gets that property on their listing, when you know they could have heard that from from somebody else, that they weren't even involved in those conversations. But I think being able to equip people with easy way to pull that data that can be consumed easily, also by the realtor side, it's just it starts the relationship on a great note.

Larry Hoffer  33:16  
Embracing the real estate community is fantastic. There's a significant number of vacation rental managers will never become real estate brokers because they want to stay independent, and I encourage that, unless that becomes your core business is nurture those relationships, because companies that have their in house brokerage, it's hard to cleave them away. So people who are independent just nurture those relationships and give them tools to help them engage with you and refer business to you. Awesome.

Alex Husner  33:43  
Well, this was a great overview. Larry, I'm sure we're going to have you back on the show more, and I think we're hopefully going to hear from from Brett Perry at some point over the next month or so.

Larry Hoffer  33:53  
Yes, Brett's going to come in. We were lucky. For a lot of you, we were fortunate you'll see this this fall. This is a little Andy at Alex preview. Brett Perry's the former EVP head of growth at streamline. He was employee number two or three, and worked with Carlos for 20 years. I've known him for a long time. Just about a year or so, he joined, joined the company as our EVP, and he's helping us. One of the things he's doing in the role is, you know, one of the things you didn't ask is on rentalz. How do we get bookings? We spend zero on SEO because we'll never win. We spend zero on Pay Per Click because we'll never win. We create private label booking sites for travel agents and brands, so your properties will be put in front of travelers that and Brett is running that side of the business. He's doing an amazing job. We've hired hundreds and hundreds of travel agents in the past few weeks so but you'll see at the trade shows this fall. Our tagline is breakthrough growth. Our theme is breakthrough growth using the Breaking Bad theme,

Alex Husner  34:54  
Oh, wow.

Annie Holcombe  34:55  
This is gonna be fun.

Larry Hoffer  34:57  
There's someone. You know that's appearing on a podcast right now, who's bald, who wears a hat, sidekick has a resemblance to Yes,

Alex Husner  35:10  
oh my gosh, I never thought of this hilarious. So

Larry Hoffer  35:14  
at you will see breakthrough growth, where we're cooking up some stuff at the trade shows,

Annie Holcombe  35:21  
chemistry. I

Larry Hoffer  35:22  
love it. You'll see you'll see Heisenberg and his sidekick. If you have some cookie, has some breakthrough growth this fall. Wow.

Alex Husner  35:30  
Well, that's going to be super exciting. And we'll definitely make sure to head over to the booth and

Larry Hoffer  35:38  
you'll see the show. I'll send you offline. I'll send you our graphics so you can see like, well, thank you. Well,

Alex Husner  35:44  
if anybody wants to get in touch with you, Larry, what's the best way for them to reach out? Go to the

Larry Hoffer  35:47  
rentalzcompany.com. Rentalz with Z. It's the only way you spell rentalz, and there's a million ways of reaching us. Has access to it and actually go to rentalz.me. M, E, so we put together an interactive flipbook that explains our whole story on breakthrough growth and in one place@rentalz.me, it tells our story. It's basically we brought trade shows to you. It goes to each one of our brands and services with an interactive flipbook environment that allow you to understand what we do. Some stuff may not be relevant to some companies, and some will be really relevant. So it's all there. Rentalz with a z.me is the best place to do it, and you can contact us

Alex Husner  36:27  
there. Very cool, awesome. Well, we look forward to seeing you at the upcoming shows when we're all back on the circuit here soon. Thank you so much for coming on, Larry, and to the whole rentalz company for sponsoring the podcast. We're excited to have you as part of our audience and network here, but 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.