On this episode of Alex & Annie : The Real Women of Vacation Rentals, Alex is joined by D. Brooke Pfautz, Founder of Vintory - a company that is laser-focused on helping vacation rental managers grow their inventory. Brooke stumbled into the vacation rental space right before the global economic crisis of 2008 when he founded Vantage Resort Realty which quickly grew to 500+ properties under management and became one of the country’s largest vacation rental managers. After exiting from Vantage in 2013, Brooke held a couple of positions in the space until launching Vintroy 4 and a half years ago, and he’s now helped over 600 companies to grow their inventory.
Guests are the lifeline of your vacation rental business, however, too many companies don’t have a proactive strategy for acquiring new homeowners and often only tend to this matter once they experience significant churn. Brooke quotes a study they did which showed that an inventory acquisition strategy is 4-6x more impactful than marketing or revenue management, yet vacation rental companies disregard this motion, ultimately leaving a ton of business on the table.
Brooke recently published his 2nd book - “Vacation Rental Secrets: The Short-Term Rental Industry’s Top Experts Disclose their Biggest Mistakes and Share their Hard-Earned Wisdom”, which features our very own Alex Husner and quite a few recurring guests we’ve had on Alex & Annie. The inception of the book happened when Brooke was presented with the question of what are 10 biggest mistakes you’ve made in your journey so far, which then went viral on LinkedIn and had people from all across the industry reaching out to share their mistakes, which Brooke turned into a daily post cadence, which then laid the foundation for the book!
Brooke brings up chapter nr. 8 from the book, which highlights a fact about inventory that’s been mentioned on the show before and should be reminded to managers more often - disqualification is key to scale. Not all inventory is good inventory, and the negative impact of working with bad owners far outweighs the immediate revenue gain.
Tune into this episode to learn how to make inventory your superpower!
HIGHLIGHTS:
01:15 Brooke’s Journey until Vintory
04:26 New Property Acquisition Strategies
09:26 Choosing The Right Market
11:41 The Book is Here!
15:42 Brooke’s Favorite Mistakes
17:15 Culture Index and Predictive Index Integration
21:43 Disqualification is Key to Scale
26:21 Marketing Your Book Launch
29:25 What's on The Vintory Roadmap
This episode is brought to you by Casago and Rev & Research!
Connect with Brooke:
Website - https://vintory.com/watch-demo/
Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/d-brooke-pfautz-1a4a4a1/
Book - https://www.amazon.com/Vacation-Rental-Secrets-Short-Term-Hard-Earned-ebook/dp/B0CCPCCM41/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=kG1CE&content-id=amzn1.sym.579192ca-1482-4409-abe7-9e14f17ac827&pf_rd_p=579192ca-1482-4409-abe7-9e14f17ac827&pf_rd_r=134-5059209-4096220&pd_rd_wg=7UXd9&pd_rd_r=5159befb-d2b3-40bb-a186-8017b4a998c6&ref_=aufs_ap_sc_dsk
Connect with Alex and Annie:
Alex Husner - https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-o-husner-%F0%9F%8C%8E-1844306/
Annie Holcombe - https://www.linkedin.com/in/annie-holcombe-vrgal/%20AlexAndAnniePodcast.com/
