Navigating Regulations, Sustainable Scaling, and Tech: Hostaway's Insights for Vacation Rental Operators - with CEO, Marcus Rader

Alex Husner  0:01  
welcome to Alex & Annie: the real women of vacation rentals. I'm Alex. And I'm Annie. And we are joined today for the third time this is a three peat for Marcus Rader, who is the CEO of hostaway and our new sponsor of the podcast. We're so excited to see you today. Marcus, thank you very much for having me. Again, it's a pleasure to be here and lovely to see you again, 

Annie Holcombe  0:57  
we're really excited to talk to you. And I think again, I always say this, but people know who you are. But maybe just a refresher for some of our newer listeners who Marcus Rader is and who hostaway is. 

Marcus Rader  1:06  
Thank you. My name is Marcus, I'm the CEO and co founder and host away this year, actually, we became the largest all in one solution for vacation rental property managers. So we produce vacation rental software, we just happen to be bigger than anyone else on the planet doing that. That's pretty amazing. Considering we started only nine years ago, so we have had a tremendous growth spurt here, and where but we're not done yet where we're going to continue growing. And we're gonna reshape the landscape and hopefully improve the industry a lot now. 

Alex Husner  1:40  
And how many properties on hostaway, 

Marcus Rader  1:43  
we can't say publicly, what I can say is that anyone in this space, who mentioned that number outside of a publicly listed company, so if Airbnb mentions it, that's probably true, but everyone else will, if they give a number, they'll they'll give a false number. But we have some pretty, let's say powerful access to these type of metrics from our competition. So we know very good cryptic, but I like, yeah.

The problem with being in this position is I spend most of my days signing NDA, so about what I can and cannot say anywhere. And this is, you know, public. So I can't honestly remember all the NDAs that I have signed, but yeah, that's just what it is. When you grow, I guess, 

Alex Husner  2:25  
yeah, what a journey you've had since the first time we had you on the show was actually it was two years ago about this time, and my gosh, so much has happened not only with hostaway, but just in the industry, you know, since that point, and I guess maybe just to start, what are your thoughts now that we're in the mid point through 2024? What are your clients hearing? Like? What are the pain points? What are the main things that the feedback is coming back to your team, 

Marcus Rader  2:47  
I'd say the number one is, is regulation, it's killing a lot of places, not the obvious places. But in our small town somewhere where short term rentals was never a problem. Now suddenly, they need to figure something out. That's something that's going on also on a bigger level in Europe, they are looking more country level and even EU level legislation to figure these things out. And that's going to be a short term pain. It's quite fascinating. I'm staying in an illegal short term rental in New York now in a dedicated rental building that someone is subletting illegally to me for a week. And what I learned here this week is that before Airbnb, it was a massive market, a gray market in New York before it was illegal, essentially, New York is a fascinating place. Because a lot of people go through here, they might move to the country and then go somewhere else. They might be, let's say musicians on a tour, and they stop in New York, and then they move on. And at the same time, there's a lot of business, a lot of wealth and a lot of connections in this city. Now the people that come here and make it they obviously want to be more private and selective. So a lot of the buildings here are condos. A lot of them are coops where you have to apply to even buy a unit. You know, you can't just use money and get a place you have to prove that you're the right kind of person to fit in. So a lot of this has been regulated for decades on a very local level on a building level. But still there has been a massive gray market or should I call it black market where these units are rented out. I just met a local friend and he said the way rents are going nobody can afford to leave their home. Because if you're leaving your home for a week, you can't afford that you have to rent it out. It's not possible. It's like a prison if you can't rent it out. So under new regulations here where they're essentially saying, Hey, you want to keep doing a black market, your gray market stuff, that's okay, but Airbnb and VRBO you're the bad guys. You make it visible. We need more Craigslist, we need like nondescript, no photos, that's okay. And then I'll

lot of fraud a lot of people are gonna give money I'm not gonna place in return New York City saying that's okay. That's all okay. Because and that's always been okay, but then doing it above the ground or visible bringing in tax dollars. That's not okay. That's to me is insanity. It's just crazy. Yeah, totally crazy. How did you book that property? Originally I booked it on Airbnb, then the listing got shut down and it got cancelled. Hosts Should I call him reached out to me and said, Yo, just send me the money. I'm still doing it.

Annie Holcombe  5:30  
So Marcus and I were just at the skiff to short term rental summit forum, I think forum is what they call it this week, and they had a session on regulatory and they had met Curtis, who speaks a lot at vrma. And then the mayor of Columbia, South Carolina, and they talked about some of this, what Marcus is referring to is I believe it was somebody that used to work for VRBO had rented a vacation rental. And it was one of those ones, it was like black market, like didn't know it. And they were in the unit. And then the regulatory folks came out and knocked on the door and said, You gotta go like he had his whole family in a unit and they were kicked out because they were caught. And so there's a lot of this. So hopefully, Marcus, that won't happen to you.

Alex Husner  6:11  
If we have to cut this recording short,

Annie Holcombe  6:13  
don't answer the door, don't answer the door. But Marcus brought up a really good point about is I think that obviously regulatory is it's getting into the crevices of like all these communities. But one of the things that they were talking about was, there's all this data that shows why some of the regulations just don't make sense, like New York is a great example. So they're losing tourism dollars to tax base to New Jersey. So all these people are spending their money going into New Jersey and staying there. But then they have people that are just deciding you know what, I'll go to Chicago or you know, Boston and not go to New York. So New York is like the businesses are going to be suffering from that. But the greater thing is, like ultimately boils down to is like, there's a lot of emotion behind it. And so Marcus made a comment before we started recording about like, you know, the psychology of it. And so it would be really interesting, like moving forward into vrma, like what the psychologist would recommend, like how you approach these communities, because there's a lot of these people that are just making these decisions based on like this visceral gut reaction to what they think is happening. And they don't really know what's happening, even though the facts are telling them one way they're believing another because their gut is telling them something different. So it's such an interesting topic. And skift did a really good job touching on it. But I'm off the skift thing, Mark, as I was asking you like what were your other big takeaways from the event because it was a jam packed agenda. They started at nine in the morning, and they ran till five o'clock, and it was just 20 minute sessions all day long. But some really, really phenomenal speakers. 

Marcus Rader  7:37  
Yeah, I think the most interesting session was definitely the one with the mayor of Columbia, South Carolina and Matt Curtis, founder of Spark city about regulations and how these decisions often get made based on on feelings rather than facts. I really liked the example where the politicians in a small town I don't remember which one, but they had promised that they're going to have three full time enforcement officers because of all the problems because the reason why they're regulated was all the problems. Now what they found out was that they didn't have enough work for those three staff. Because turns out once they started systematically measuring the problems, it were no problems to be found. So they had on average, one complaint per week. But the nature of the complaints was exactly the opposite of what it was supposed to be. And it wasn't the single family home with 25. College kids partying all night, that wasn't a problem. No, the problem was that someone had forgot to take in the garbage cans. Yeah, it was a trash issue. Remember that? There was one complaint about too many cars parked on a public road where you're allowed to park that has nothing to do with short term rentals. But it's you don't need three full time staff. So when you started looking at the actual facts and numbers behind these decisions, you realize very quickly that no, there's a lot based on feelings. And that's very different from what I've been thinking before. Also, one thing that's becoming more and more evident is that you simply can't scale a vacation rental business to massive numbers, it's incredibly hard to maintain the quality and actually a large part of the market will continue to be small owner operated for the foreseeable future. 

Alex Husner  9:17  
That's interesting. So was that a topic of conversation about scaling at the conference? 

Marcus Rader  9:22  
Not so much, not so much I was, I think anyone who looks at the stock price of sunder or evolve or Vacasa, they're very clear on that subject. But thinking back a few years, I mean, everyone said, this is a big industry that's gonna consolidate and everything's gonna be big, and it's gonna be good, that standardized, and we're still not seeing that today. We're still not seeing it. I'm getting better service here from this illegal guy. Yeah, he's doing a great job. I mean, he he wants me to just stay here, and then leave and anything I need. It's right here like this is this is amazing. 

Annie Holcombe  9:57  
And the staff that was shared was that 95% of the pie that you and I talked about Alex, we used to say 25 75 95% of that pie is operators. It's five units or under. So 95 Wow. 95 Yeah, it was. And so it was very astounding. But the one of the last sessions I did was with Philip canard from future stay. And he talked about having that segment be represented. And so you know, there's no seat at the table at pharma for them. So what they're doing is they're building their own table over at some of these other conferences, which is what we talk about, how do we reach them, we may have already hit a tipping point with pharma where we can't reach them. But how do we get more involved and make sure that those people under five units or even under 10 units are getting access to information? And that's what Phillip and I had some side conversations about. And I think my question for you, Marcus is obviously that's a growth opportunity for you even being the largest, that there's still opportunity out there for you to grow. What do you see is your ability to tap into that and both ensure that they're doing all the right things, but that if they need help, and they get need education like that they can get it? Do you think that that's something that host away can help foster within their community is the education and the ability to professionalize and standardize, you know, within their side of the business that we on the larger professional side are always asking for? Do you think you guys can do that? 

Marcus Rader  11:18  
Absolutely. We're constantly doing it. We have marketing webinars monthly. But what we also have for our customer base is more practical down to earth webinars to our user base. And what I found out recently is that those of way more popular, there's a huge amount of property managers tuning in every week to our user webinars. Speaking of Phillip, if you're listening, thanks a lot for the whiskey shots. I had a pretty terrible, God decided to have a steak sandwich. And then I went for a 13 mile run. I run the entire south end of Manhattan in a circle. So did you have the whiskey before or after? The night before? Yes. Oh, the night before. Okay. Philip, Florida whiskey, that was very great kind of you. So we're actually organizing our first user conference this year is called Host Chela. It's going to be in Miami. In November, we tried to choose a date. That's not the highest obvious season when everything really packed. But also when it's, it starts getting cold. In some places of the world, we have almost sold out of tickets, the demand has been massive. And we have a good package of sponsors, including some well known brands like Airbnb on verbal, but also partners for marketplace, the events industry in this space has somewhat had an implosion this year, it's been fascinating to see I'm still waiting to see when we can get at a table and talk to vrma. And see what do we do about this because it's, it's just not working, the events that are being organized, they don't reach the right audience. They don't reach the midsize and smaller property managers or owner operators. And that's, that's a challenge. That's a challenge. Because if if the industry isn't going in a direction, well, only a couple of big ones will survive. But it's rather the opposite, that this is a local service. And the more locally are the better service you can give. Well, in that case, we didn't new format. So we're trying to do our best. And that's why we're organizing this event in November. 

Alex Husner  13:22  
I had a conversation with somebody about this the other day that it's almost like the vendor Hall concept needs to be completely overhauled, creatively thinking like, what are ways that vendors can engage with the property managers at these events, we'll get hopefully, more in different people too. But there has to be more meaningful conversations, whether that's the more of the roundtables or more of like the smaller group formats, because I was talking to another company earlier this morning, you get so many property management companies that they're going to these shows or even not at the shows, they're buying so many different pieces of tech that overlap and do the same things. And they don't know that as they're doing it. And it's like Everybody's hungry for information. And I think a lot of companies, they do listen to these podcasts and some go to the conferences, but there's a huge amount of people that don't go to the events. But there's nobody that's really giving them a high level guidance on like, you know, this is a good decision. This isn't you don't need to do this. And I think just the way that the vendor Hall has been set up, it's not conducive to having the best conversations with the people that are there, that you're educating them, you're talking about what it is that you offer, but doing it in a way that it's you know, it's truly going to benefit their business and make those connections and the number one thing that we saw on one of the VRMA surveys was the number one reason that people go to these events is the networking. So how can that be reinvented in a way that really fosters those conversations and relationships to be built?  

Marcus Rader  14:49  
Yeah, you're touching on on a really important topic. One of the most fascinating aspects that I've learned running a tech company for the last nine years is that human  The nature is to set up obstacles. And it's much easier for you to achieve something if you have an obstacle, I'm sure you've heard someone say, Oh, I would exercise except I have this old injury, or, you know, I wish I could go on a diet. But you know, I'm restricted to this or that I can't do it, it's great to have an excuse. And today, let's say for an average employee, if you need an excuse, which is once again, I'm not saying that it's in any way lazy or wrong, it's just human nature is that if something is easy, and it's right there, then our brain reacts to it as if something's wrong. Typical example is $100 Bill is lying on the street, very few people are going to pick it up, even if they see it, because they think, okay, it must be fake. But then, if you have an obstacle in between a technology can be that obstacle, then it's so much easier. So you can say I could do my job, except I don't have the right tools, I need to find a new tool. And then you end up often choosing the tool that's hardest to implement. So Oh, I could go running. But I need these special shoes where the delivery time is six weeks, you know, rather than well actually Arang shoes right now you can, you could run in DOS will have the same impact. But that's, that's the thing. But Well, it's funny how these events because they're very much related to the tech landscape, because such a huge part of the budget for these events is paid by the tech companies. And for the last 10 years, there has been a massive inflow of capital to these tech companies. Now, with higher interest rates, it's getting very, very difficult to get any funding at all. And as a result of it all these companies are forced to start looking at their budgets when there's not unlimited capital anymore. And unfortunately, for the event organizers, it seems that the events are not producing the ROI that they need. So this is why we're seeing so much talk about events this year. It's it's essentially that free money is yours here for 10 years, 15 years. Now it's no longer here. Now we actually need to produce value to get any dollar whatsoever. And that can be a big shock for especially bigger organizations like vrma. 

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Alex Husner  18:36  
We've heard some vendors say that I'm just wanted to get your thoughts on this, but that they would be willing to pay for all the property managers to go to a show if the cost for property managers was essentially free or very, very low cost. What are your thoughts on that? 

Marcus Rader  18:51  
I think that sounds great. Absolutely a good idea to prices for the tickets should overall be be a bit lower. But then I'm not in the events business other than our own event. That one we're going to be running at a loss, I hope because it's an investment that we want to make in the community. Yeah, I don't know if the economics work. That's the thing. I'm not an expert on the event. No more property managers came I'm sure all the vendors would be really mad at that point. Well, that's not what has been happening now. In a lot of events, running and one challenge with the cheaper ticket prices. There was one trade show where I went where the organizers straight out said that okay, we sold this many tickets. Here's how many people showed up. So asked what was the price of the ticket like early bird prices for 59 and then 159. Well, maybe that's why they didn't show up. They bought the ticket. But then they figured out that the sheduled traveled time to hotel restaurants that adds up way more. It could be that if you sell cheap tickets or a free event, nobody shows up. 

Annie Holcombe  19:53  
I've talked to some people lately about the idea of doing more regionally focused events and harshly be cuz exactly that the travel component is really hard. So you know, whenever the events are done on the East Coast, a lot of times the west coast and like Hawaii, they can't come because it's just too cost prohibitive, and it's just too many time zones away. And same thing for East Coast going, you know, farther to the west. So would you see a scenario where, you know, again, if we just use vrma, as an example that they do, like vrma, East West, or, you know, north, south east west, like something along those lines? Do you see a scenario where that would be of benefit? I feel like it would be because it'd be easier to get people to it. But what are your thoughts on that? 

Marcus Rader  20:31  
Potentially, but I mean, they have their spring forum that is in different locations, but it's not that successful, and even vrma International, first of all, it's not International, because there's nobody from outside of the US there, except maybe me as a Canadian, it doesn't address the real problem of the underlying economics there. And also the content, the content, I was gonna say that would be the other thing that needs to be relevant. I mean, if we have 1000s of people tuning in on how to find out how to optimize one little aspect of the business 1000s of property managers tune into a webinar on that. How can you go to a presentation at VRMA , it's 25 people in the audience, that part I don't understand at all. 

Alex Husner  21:13  
Well, I love what you guys said about skiff, every session was 20 minutes, I think that would be a phenomenal thing to try. Because it's hard when everybody's in different rooms. And I was just at the VMA executive Summit. And one of the things that I and I think everybody else there really enjoyed about it was that we were all in one room for the sessions. And there weren't multiple, I mean, it was a smaller list of content that was up there. But doing smaller sessions, shorter sessions, not longer duration that you can get more people speaking but you know, sitting for an hour and a half. And a presentation is too long, in my opinion, 

Annie Holcombe  21:46  
like they did a really good job of again, making it relevant, but they put it in these bytes of time where it wasn't too much information. But I think to the point, one of the things that I know, Alex, you and I've talked about and Marcus, I think you're on the same track we are is that, you know, if you want to have people from all aspects of the industry, from small to large, you have to have different tracks. And I know this has come up for years at Vermont, I don't know why we can't seem to get there is like having an entry level track. Like, here's how you start the business. Here's how you grow your business. And here's what you do when you're already grown. And I think the problem is we've got all the already groans, trying to tell everybody else how to do it. And maybe they don't have the same vision. So they go one time, and they hear it and they're like, not aligned with that thought process. So they're out there searching for somebody that will align with their thought process. And it's really just more about what are the basics that people need. And so I feel like we're at a tipping point now like something Something has to give and so Marcus, what you're trying to do with your event, I think is great, you're going to be inclusive of the industry as a whole. Like we're you're going to provide all of that knowledge that doesn't matter how large or small you are, people will be able to access and you're already doing it. It sounds like from your webinars. So if everybody could learn from that and we could replicate whatever you're doing, so we'll go to your event and watch it and see how good it goes. 

Alex Husner  23:03  
Host Chela already sounds like a lot of fun. Did a good job bringing the fun to it. I think that's an important part too. 

Marcus Rader  23:10  
Yeah, I'm trying to arrange some upside sessions as well, including beach yoga and early morning sunrise run with led by me personally. But you're right, there needs to be some basics because even us as a business. We took him an investor last year PSG they run some of the best software companies on the planet. Sometimes they ask really basic questions. And it's things that we have spent, you know, maybe I spent six years of my life answering that question, but I haven't looked at it in the last three months. And suddenly, I don't know the answer anymore. And I can give a perfect example of this. I finally got my home in Bonita Springs in southwest Florida. It just needed furniture. And I am using a property manager there. And the owner said, you know, my wife is great interior designer, and I thought, okay, let's have her do her thing. So she went in and put in furniture and then got the photos. When I got the photos, I realized that they'd done it all wrong. Because when you compare in the area, you see every single pool, we'll have a giant inflatable Flamingo, and our pool doesn't have that. Something that was mentioned that the session is gift people want firepits Yeah, no kidding. We have a firepit. But there's no photo with what I call Adirondack chairs, in golf for chairs. And then those cheap string lights from Costco, like every other property that has a firepit has a picture like that. Why is ours missing? And then there should be the secret closet filled with toys and maybe a big bear or something for the kids. Where's that picture? And it's missing? We're not gonna get any bookings on that property because we don't have the pink flamingo in the pool. And it's it's so obvious when you go and look you look at the 10 most popular properties every single one has a swimming. Why don't we have a flamingo, but that's just what happens. You know, this property manager was very passionate when they got started. But then everything got complex and there was, \, a lot of things to do. And then they think they're doing a good job, but they can't even get the basics, right. Like, just look at the competition, if everyone has a thing for me just put up thing for me or there's private Walmart.

But this is the kind of education you need. It's not only beginners that need that. It's also the property managers that have grown because the very basics of the business can very easily be forgotten when things get complex, and they do get complex. 

Annie Holcombe  25:42  
So I think that's that was one of the things that was in some of the sessions was kind of apparent is like people think they know what's going on. But they're not like getting back in touch with the business enough to really understand what is it that the consumer is looking for your people are spending so much money, trying to change consumer behavior, and consumer behavior is really expensive to change should just go to the consumer and look what they want, and deliver that to them and quit trying to tell them. You know, it's that old adage of like, you know, let the market be what it's going to be don't try to tell it what it should be. And so I think that there's too many people trying to tell the consumer how they should behave, and not listening to or looking at what their actual actions are. 

Marcus Rader  26:20  
Yeah, but also the type of sessions or I find them quite often way too generic and unpractical. I mean, for example, if you open up and show data about the US market, and so regional markets and bookings a lead time, so you list what the OTAs like to do that list, popular amenities. And then they say you shouldn't be lakefront. Well, if you manage 20 homes, and five of them are lakefront, you can't just take the other 15 and move them lakefront. Like that's what really actionable insight, what is actionable insight is okay, you got five lakefront homes, here's how to do it the right way. And here's how to do it the wrong way. For example, when you take a picture of the living room, and it's looking over the lake, take an HDR photo, take three different photos with with different settings so that you can see both the inside my dark and the outside. And that's an actionable insight. But I never see that in the sessions. And it's quite upsetting to me honestly, how little information you're getting, because if someone says, oh, the booking lead time has gone from 30 days to 60 days. What does that really mean for your business? Right? Yeah. What are the implications? Is it like if your business is doing well, or you're supposed to feel better that okay, now everyone else is doing bad, but I'm doing well. Or if your business is doing badly, are you supposed to say, Oh, well, this sucks, but everyone else sucks to value. And there's absolutely no value whatsoever. 

Alex Husner  27:46  
And I think that's the takeaway that most companies have when they go to events. It's like the or that's like, that is a successful conference. If you go and you feel like we're doing better than everybody. We know all this stuff, you know, and I think maybe part of that mentalities is what's gotten us to where we are, you shouldn't walk away thinking that you just know more than everybody else. I mean, chances are other people there know, things that you don't know, but it's got to be more of an open format to get that information out there. And to your point, more actionable things that can be taken home and executed on one question, Marcus, as you said earlier, that, you know, scale is not possible. But and I think you're meant more unlike the Vacasa the very, very large size scale, but from your clients, and just kind of your perspective on the industry. Do you think scale is still possible? And are you seeing it on on companies that are going from, you know, 300 to 600? Or if they're going from one market and adding another market? I think there's a lot of really ambitious companies in this space right now that that's what they are going for. But you know, some, unfortunately, find that it's a lot more difficult than what they had originally planned. But what do you think on that side of scale, either within a market growing a lot of inventory, or going into multiple markets, 

Marcus Rader  28:56  
I definitely have changed my view over the years. I haven't actually looked at the metrics for our customer base. I know some are growing really well. But I've been doing some extensive traveling over the last actually this year, I booked to under 25 travel days, but it seems like it's gonna be a bit more. I think I stayed one night in a hotel so far out, around 110 days, I've been traveling now this year, you need to get down to the basics. And it's just very hard to deliver that quality and that passion that you can unless you really know how to scale a business, the number of properties that you manage isn't really relevant. What's what's more relevant is whether the business is making a profit, whether it's working in a way that if you go away for a week, the business will still run. And that's something that a lot of property managers are missing. They're looking at a spreadsheet and they're looking at the number of properties, but if they don't deliver the good guests experiences, overdose, and that can be very hard to do if you're in multiple locations. And then you're gonna run into problems. And yeah, you don't even know what look, you should be looking yourself in the mirror. But that's quite often not what people want to do. Again, human nature works in certain ways. And you're always trying to find something else to blame than yourself. That's what I think is the biggest hurdle for scaling is getting your own organization in shape, getting the right leadership in place, getting the right people, and understanding that if I mean, pretty much, everyone in this space is a founder when they start their property management company, but they have to understand that founders have superpowers, you can't hire a founder. So if you expect to scale your business, you just need to accept that whatever you're doing, you can hire someone, but the efficiency the output, it's going to be best case, it's going to be half of whatever you're doing. So if your expectations are that you can hire people like yourself, well, sorry, you can't they're working for themselves. That's just the way it goes. So yeah, there's there's a lot of dimensions to the, to the scaling aspects of the business. 

Annie Holcombe  29:59  
So speaking of scaling, if somebody wants to scale, and you've obviously scaled, we've talked about this largest company on the planet in our space, that means that you have obviously iterate and add technologies and add features to your platform. So what do you have in the works? Or what do you want to share with people that you guys are working on for users of your platform, 

Marcus Rader  31:27  
so we just launched hostaway capital that was actually really successful, because it gives property managers access to capital based on the data that's already in the system. So normally, let's say you want a business loan for marketing, or maybe you want to furnish them out of rental or hire one more staff, that's expensive, too, you'd have to do a lot of due diligence. But because our system already knows the business, you can get a loan decision in 24 hours. And we have been really surprised over how many people take advantage of that. Because when we have the data, and we're basically a third party, verifying that you are who you are, you can get a lot lower interest rates. So that's been a really successful launch. There's a lot of additional products that we are going to be launching this year. And some of our competitors already offered them. But they are usually tools or services that property managers use on a daily or weekly basis. And it's just been outside the platform to our marketplace, and that we're going to be offered the inside the software as well, which makes it easier, for example, to scale to train your staff that, hey, you can do this within hostaway. So there's a quite a big roadmap of additional functionality coming out this year. 

Alex Husner  32:38  
That's really cool. On the capital side, I think you're the only ones doing that, that I know of that's a unique value proposition. And what a way to show that you're a partner in your clients success by offering that 

Annie Holcombe  32:49  
yeah, it's quite a unique concept. We got the idea from the E commerce space, you know, Shopify is quite a big thing. I'm their headquarters are about a five minute walk from where I live. And yeah, they've been doing a session about partnering up with financial institutions, because they got all the data, they know how much you're selling, they know how much your cost basis is they know, you know, whether you're growing or not, and they can do projections. So they have been doing this for years and helping the successful ones who just need access to more capital get it easier. That was the main driver motivation behind this, that's a smart thing to add to question on, like taking marketplace and bringing it in. One thing that we have heard a little bit of rumblings as of late is there are some organizations that have all the pieces, they have the channel management, and they have the PMs, and then they have the credit card services. And they have all this and what they have done is started to force users to only use the tools that they have, and not allowing them to tack on the ones that they already may be comfortable with. And really, really like when they came to you or some at some point added them in what is your thought on kind of the larger ecosystem of all the technology and allowing people to use the tools that they're comfortable with, as opposed to forcing them? Is there kind of a middle of the road approach that you're taking and that you've got the services that you want them to use a specific amount of your services? Or is it still a situation where they can just pick and choose what they want as they grow? 

Marcus Rader  34:16  
We have as far as I know the largest marketplace, we have over 200 integrated software partners, and we sincerely if any of you are listed, we sincerely recommend you to our users. And it's very simple because if you do something that's very unique, like let's say a guide book, you're probably the best company in the world doing that and we shouldn't be recommending the best solutions to our our customers. But subway we mentioned here earlier is that a lot of people want to use technology for the sake of using technology because they they want to create an obstacle in order to get to their goal. And as such, they take our technology into us and they don't fully use it they might be using 20% of ticket

ability and actually then when you ask the user base turns out that 80% of them, they only need that 20%, they don't need the rest. And when we ask them, they would actually prefer that it's within hostaway. So we are in no way planning to compete with our partners on the marketplace. Instead, we're trying to offer the basic functionality that some of them offer within our platform, to those who let's be honest, the majority, that's, that's good enough, they would only be using 20 presets, but for those users who want to use those selection of whatever our marketplace partners are offering, of course, they'll always be able to use that. 

Alex Husner  35:38  
I love that. And that's such a difference in the mindset compared to you know, I mean, there's some software's out there now, that still really keep your hands tied. But gosh, you'd go back 510 years ago, and it's like, everything was so locked down at that point. But I love that host away embodies that and understands there's so many different ways to do this business. I mean, you can be two companies in the same market that operate completely different and you go different market or different sides of the country. And it really could look like a totally different business inside. So to restrict what companies are able to access is not fair. You know, and I think a lot of property managers now are cognizant of that because of either it's happened to them, or they've heard it happen to their peers, that you don't want to be in something that's going to limit your ability to grow. And you don't want to have to overhaul your entire tech stack, because there's something new that you want to try that you're not able to do. So that's really great. 

Marcus Rader  36:28  
Yeah, well, our industry is a derivative of the real estate industry. And in the real estate industry, there's one symbolism of it, it's a board game called monopoly. When you look at the people, I mean, you got some of the richest people in the world, and even former US president, you know, it's all based on real estate and their mentality is that you got to eventually own the whole thing. Like there's no coexisting. But the thing is that a lot of the people in this space, they really have that mentality that they're going to own the world. And I think if you have that attitude, that's great submission. But if you actually go and tell people that, that you're going to put them out of business, that's really not a good way to succeed. And that's why a lot of companies in our space have have got a really bad reputation, I think, or they're not likable. And we've always been extremely tried, we try our best to be extremely humble. Because we know how hard it is to build a business from scratch, we got 1000s of customers who have built a business from scratch, and we have nothing much respect for them. And I'll give a good example, a couple of years ago, our competitors started realizing how valuable the data in their system is, and they started selling it to third parties. What that actually means is, if you're using software to run your business, that same software company is taking your business secrets and selling it to your competition, that is absolutely insane. And when I found out about that we can make a lot of money, I instantly said no, we're never going to do that. Because these are our customers. Our job here is to protect them from reality out there. But then I found out that it's what everyone does. And we still don't do it, we still don't sell our data, our customers data without their knowledge to anyone because I think it's it would be unfair. But these are things that a lot of property managers don't even realize, 

Annie Holcombe  38:25  
well, Marcus, I think you have a great approach to the way you handle your customers, the way you handle the business. And what I love is that what you just said there is going to enable more creativity, collaboration and advancement in our industry. And I think I'm all for consolidation, where it makes sense. But consolidation to me is also what suffocates the creativity and all of the great technology that's been built, because it starts to get into one, you know, like singular thought process. So I applaud you and really enjoy the fact that you guys are open to be, you know, part of the world not controlling the world. That's a really great place to be. But I know that you are tight on time, and we have to end this but we want to have you back. And obviously with hostaway being one of our brand sponsors. We're super excited for that before we let you go. Are there any parting words that you want to share with anybody? 

Marcus Rader  39:14  
Yeah, thanks. Thanks for the reminder. Yeah, to go go to my next meeting. But it was really nice to have you here. There was something I wanted to say. But I'll save that for next time. 

Alex Husner  39:25  
Well, it's been such a pleasure to see you again, Marcus, you're only the second guest in history to have been on the podcast three times. an esteemed group. And I think Annie said the last time it was Pete DeMaio has been on three times with travel boom, we're eventually going to have a mug for you or some sort of prize. But until then, it's an honor. Well, thank you so much. You always share great insights and I know our listeners are always excited to listen to your episodes. But until the next time that you make it for the true record, which will be four times on the show. What's a good way for our listeners to get in touch. 

Oh you can gen in touch on on hostaway.com We got no matter what what do you want to talk to us about? We got a lot of people we have almost 200 staff now in 40 countries are fully remote organization want to reach out to me personally just Google for LinkedIn Marcus hostaway the first result there. That's perfect. And if anybody wants to get in touch with Annie and I you can go to AlexandAnniepodcast.com Thanks for tuning in everybody.