Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hey, all. Welcome back to another episode of the short term show. Today I've got a really cool guest, Jeff Brown of IntelliHost, and he's got a really cool story that we are really excited to share with you today. So how's it going, Jeff?
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Good, Avery. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me on.
[00:00:19] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, thanks for coming on. So can you start off by just telling us a little bit about yourself?
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. I started. Started my. My career in the corporate world. I went to Target corporate headquarters in Minneapolis and started to cut my teeth on data. I was an analyst there, and I went from there, gradually went to smaller companies, like. Like, startup level. And I joined a startup. I was like, employee number four, and we did data analytics for companies that sold on Amazon. So I kind of learned the ropes of E commerce, how to sell online, how to use data to do that, and I really just wanted to cut my teeth on my own adventure. And so we started Loma homes back in 2020, and Loma Homes is a vacation rental brand that specialized in unique experiences. So think like, muraled walls, fog machines under beds, and just really cool experiences. We started in Orlando. Well, really, we started way back in Joshua Tree before it was, like, a thing. You know, everybody, like, does Joshua Tree now, but we did Joshua Tree, and then we did Orlando, we did Destin, Panama City beach, we did Poconos. And we raised capital from investors, bought those properties, renovated them, and cash flowed off. That worked really well. But the data nerd in me kind of just kept surfacing while I was doing Loma Homes with my partners, Kyle and Brindy. And we eventually built a software internally that would allow us to go get Airbnb's data and analyze it in a way that was a lot more helpful than what they were doing. And with that analysis, we're able to optimize our properties in a much more advantageous way.
We had incredible properties, like, beautiful, beautiful properties that Brindy just would do amazing job on. But if you're not getting seen, we learned quickly that if you're not getting seen on Airbnb, it doesn't matter how beautiful your properties are. And so we built the software internally to really just help us optimize our listings and get on page one, get seen, get booked. Helped a ton. So we decided, you know what? This might be a venture on its own. Let's just take this software, let's make it publicly available. Let's let everybody use it. And that's when Intellihost was born. So now it's, now it's my full time gig. Kyle and Burundi, my partners manage the Loma home side and I do Intellihost. So that's, that's me in a nutshell.
[00:02:45] Speaker A: Awesome. So this is extremely interesting to me. So let's say I'm just like a consumer. What am I coming to Intellihost to do?
[00:02:53] Speaker B: Yeah, most customers come to us because they want to be seen more on Airbnb. They want to get seen more, but ultimately get more revenue.
I'm sure everybody has had a moment where their bookings just kind of like fall off a cliff. And that's when, that's why most people come to us, is they're like, I don't know what happened, but my bookings have just falling off, falling off a cliff. And I'm not really sure what just happened. So we're able to open up their, their traffic metrics, show them where they're falling behind, how they're benchmarking against competition, and tell them, you know, give them more specific recommendations on how to, how to fix that.
[00:03:28] Speaker A: I love that. And that just sounds like. So I guess my brain just doesn't work that way. I'm not a data person.
So build something like that. So what kinds of things? When people come to you with the, oh my gosh, this is fallen off a cliff, what sort of things are you finding when you open up their data?
[00:03:47] Speaker B: Yeah, so think of it, think of it like a doctor, right? If you're, if you're sick, you come with symptoms like, hey, I'm feeling, I'm not, my stomach hurts. Right? And then the doctor starts to ask you questions about what behaviors, what you've been eating, what kinds of things, and they're able to diagnose the issue. And that's really the first step of what intelligence does is we, we, we open up your dashboard and we, we collect your data from Airbnb and we break out the four steps that every guest takes to book your property. So, for example, you go to Airbnb, you search the location, the guest filter the dates, and you get a search result. Everybody that gets on there basically gets what's called an impression.
Getting in impressions is step one, but then getting on first page is step two. So we measure how many impressions did you get? How many first page impressions did you get? Then we measure how many clicks did you get and how many bookings did you get. Because by, by, by separating each step individually, you can say, okay, you're doing really well compared to your competition in the first two steps. But maybe on clicks, you're falling behind your competition. So there's a problem with your. It's either your cover photo, it's your price, it's your reviews, and that's pretty much it. Like, that's all people can see on the search result to click on you. So usually we start with the COVID photo. We'll start with those main key items. But diagnosing the problem is step number one. You really have to know what part of the listing you're struggling with in order to optimize. A lot of people will be like, my bookings fall off the cliff. And they'll just start playing with settings. They're like, instant book off, instant book on. Change the order of my photos. And they're just guessing and guessing and guessing. But if you're not having a problem with your conversion rate, don't change the order of your photos. Right. They're actually doing really well because people are clicking on you, they're seeing the photos and booking. The problem is they're not clicking on you in the first place. So we need to figure out what cover photo is best to get people to click on you. Does that make sense?
[00:05:45] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:49] Speaker A: So I want to hear more about the Loma Homes property. So I know Kyle and Brandy actually, and we've. I've seen a few of the things that y'all have done, and I would say y'all were one of the first to be doing the ultra themed properties outside of Orlando. Like, Orlando, you've kind of had to do that for a while. But I, I think y'all really were like 20, 19, 2020, like some of the first people doing those ultra themed homes. And I have some questions about that. So what. Okay, first of all, what made you decide? Because the, the whole like super, super theming of properties is, is very cool to talk about on social media right now. And I would, I would like to hear what you learned from kind of starting at the beginning with that before other people were doing it and then kind of what that looks like nowadays.
[00:06:45] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I love, love to talk about that. We have learned a lot goods and bads. So we can talk about both of those from, you know, from an ultra theming strategy.
But what I would say is the reason we did ultra themes is the first step that we did before we did before we had bought a single property is we bought all the Air DNA data. At the time, Air DNA was like the only cat and zone. So we just used Air DNA data. Yeah. And we looked for the best, what do they call the investability or investability score, where basically the cost of home was low and had the highest potential for revenue. So we were looking for that difference. And Orlando came up, Nashville came up again. This was back in 2019. So thought has changed since then.
Yeah, yeah, Orlando came up and Nashville, they're kind of our top two. And so then we're like, okay, these are profitable areas. But when we pulled up both areas, they were highly saturated already. Like, even when we back in that, back then, it was like tens of thousands of listings that we had to compete against, and a lot of them had like hundreds of reviews. So we knew that if we were going to be a new player in that, in that industry, we had to be different. We had to be super, super unique. Now this is business advice in general for anybody. But if you're going to go into a big market, you need to have a niche. You need to have something unique that makes you different if you want to succeed. So when we looked into these two markets, what we did is we started to pull again, this is the data nerd, right. But we started to pull all of the reviews, the five star reviews from these locations. We would buy data sets of like thousands and thousands of reviews for these areas. And we would do text analysis to say what are the top keywords people are using in the five star reviews? So most people in their reviews would say things like, I came for a bachelorette party, I came for this, or I came for that, or I came for family reunion, or I came for it. Right. And we analyzed what were the top reasons that people came to those areas so that we could pick a niche.
So in Orlando, it was family. Family parks, Disney parks. Family. Right. Like, those were the words people were. In Nashville, it was bachelor and bachelorette party. That was like constant. And so when we, when we saw those, we're like, you know what? I'm sure I really want to, like, host a bunch of bachelorette parties. So we're not going to do that market. We're going to pick Orlando and we're going to, we're going to if theming and if like theme parks and you know, these cool parks are what people are going for, and it's for families. Okay, great. We'll get big properties, we'll theme them out so kids absolutely love them and parents are willing to pay a premium for this unique experience.
So that's, that's how we, that's how we came to that strategy.
And I Highly recommend it for anybody going into a new area. Pick your niche, double down on that niche and be the best at that thing. You can't just be the best Airbnb in the area. There's always going to be someone with a bigger or nicer property than you. So you really just need to pick it, pick an avatar who is that customer you're really going for and go all in on that.
[00:09:49] Speaker A: Yeah, and the thing about Disney too is like if you're a family of four, so if you're two parents and two kids, then any of the Disney, any of the on Disney properties work. But as soon as you add a third kid, as soon as you're now five people, there's only four hotels, unless you want somebody to be sleeping on the couch. But where you need to add a second bedroom is what I mean, there's only four you can choose from and they're all very expensive.
Because we are, you know, we're booking a Disney trip right now and we go, we go a lot because we live in Northwest Florida. So we go to Disney four or five times a year.
[00:10:22] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:23] Speaker A: And as soon as you add that, that fifth person or the, you know, this time we're bringing my brother in law and sister in law, you have to have a vacation rental because there's only limited of the two bedroom rooms in those four hotels anyway. So there really is. You know, people like to talk about Orlando being oversaturated and Orlando did get hit pretty hard with that and Orlando's been hit pretty hard with the real estate market being in the toilet. But if you have been to Disney like anytime in the last year, I mean, you look around at all the people coming in huge groups and they're matching T shirts, they're matching everything. Those people need vacation rentals. Like there is still a definite high demand and I think kind of a lot of that saturation has, I don't want to say it's, it's gone away, but the supply increase year over year has shrunk from like 20% in 2021 to like maybe 4% or even a negative supply increase in available rentals in Orlando. So that's still like, I think a market where there's tons of opportunity, but you just really do have to make sure that you, you buy right and manage right in that market.
[00:11:39] Speaker B: Yeah, we bought, we bought our homes, nine bedroom or eight bedroom homes in Championsgate at the time for like 450 to 500,000.
Now you can't get them for less than 800,000. And that's only like four years later. And so we, I feel like we bought. Right.
And so in terms of just timing of the market that way.
But also they are big markets. Like, there's literally thousands and thousands of rentals there. So you've. If you're going to be a newcomer in that space, you really need a niche. Like, you really gotta. To narrow down into something that's, that's unique.
[00:12:15] Speaker A: Right? And we tell our clients too, when they're buying their, hey, if you're gonna buy in Orlando, you have to like, super theme. You have to. And then we've had a few scenarios where people will come back to us and they're like, we're not making money. And we themed. And we're like, are you sure you themed? Let us take a look. And. And it's like a Mickey decal on the wall. I'm like, no, no, that's not gonna. That's not super.
[00:12:36] Speaker B: That's not theming anymore.
[00:12:38] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So in that market, you really do have to. To do it. So here's a question that I have for you, because rarely I, I never get to interview people who've, Who've done the theming for longer than like, six months or a year.
So here's a question that I have because I see people, you know, services and stuff, recommending to people like, all right, let's buy this 500 property and put 250,000 worth of theming in it, which 100% is going to increase the income of the property. However, the income of the property does not determine the value of the property. So especially, like right now, where we're not seeing 50% appreciation in 18 months like we did in 2021. What would be your advice for somebody who's trying to do that right now, where you're spending like half the value of the property in cash on theming? Because my opinion is unless you're planning to hold that thing for at least 10 years, which you don't know if you're going to do unless you've done this before, unless you're experienced, you're not getting that 250 back when you go to sell it. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
[00:13:47] Speaker B: You're absolutely right. And when I kind of alluded to the positives and negatives of theming, you just nailed it on the head. This is by far the number one negative to theming you. You're not going to get that money back in terms of equity.
So you need to plan on that either like you said, hold it for a long time or unless you're really ambitious. This is a strategy that we had actually attempted before the interest rates increased. But what we were doing is we were creating a portfolio of properties. And the reason we were trying to create a portfolio of short term rentals is because when you have a portfolio you can sell a portfolio to like an institutional buyer, someone who is buying on a basis of income, but you have to have a large portfolio to do that. Like we're talking in equity. Like your home values have to be in the 20 million or more right. For it to even be worth the time and effort of an institution to come in. Ideally more like 50 to 100 million of real estate value to sell. And that was our original strategy is we're going to build a portfolio, we're going to get the income high and sell on an income basis basis. Because if you try to sell on a just a comp basis like your, you know, the appraiser comes in and just appraises that thing. They have no idea how to and they're not going to give you any value for the theming. It's a very structured process. They're going to look at what the homes around you sold for and they're like well okay, maybe I'll give you an extra ten grand for your theming. And you're like that's not going to cut it. And so you're, you know, we, we have one property right now like we bought a little bit later. So you know, values had come up. We put another $200,000 in theming into it and it's, we'll probably have to take a loss on that one because it's just never going to. Well at least unless we hold it for another 10 years, it's not going to appraise for the 1.1 that would. 1.1 million that would probably have to sell it for just to get our money back. And so definitely would have to consider that if you're going to be theming a lot is what's like how much am I willing to put into this that will not come back in equity value.
[00:15:59] Speaker A: I really appreciate your honesty about that because I think there's so many investors right now who, because they see their favorite influencers posting about the super theming and then they've got, you know, there's, there's services that you can pay for now that will tell you what to buy and, and exactly how to theme it which a lot of times is hundreds of thousands of dollars. So to me, I'd rather spend hundreds of thousands of dol. More real estate. You know, maybe we'll put 25 in the property and spend the other 250, 240. Do whatever, whatever the math comes out to on more real estate. But I really appreciate you saying that because I think a lot of new investors think, oh my God, I have to do this crazy super theme thing. And there are some major downsides to that. And I'm glad that you answered that that way because there, you really do have to be planning to hold that thing for a really long time in order to get that back. And you may never. Now, it will, it will make money, but.
Yeah, you might lose it too.
[00:16:58] Speaker B: It'll make more. Yeah, for sure. But. But there's, there's risks to theming too. Like if you get a, if you get a not so good themer or contractor, you could end up with a really cheesy and kind of tacky result, which doesn't help your theming. Like, it doesn't help.
People are like, ugh. You know, like, it's more of a turn off. And so you really have to do it right. Like, there's potential there. But one I wouldn't. Some people would call me. Like, we, we had some viral videos go out about some of like our wizard's house and our galaxy themed home intentionally named as such.
And. Oh, that's another thing. Lawsuits. Careful of that. We learned our lesson there too.
[00:17:41] Speaker A: Copyright lawsuit.
[00:17:42] Speaker B: Yep. So my. What was I gonna say on this? Oh, so I had. I would have people call me after these viral videos went out and be like, I want to see my place. I'm gonna do a, I'm gonna do a Harry Potter theme and I'm in Oregon and I'm like, you're gonna spend how much money on a home in Oregon? Are people coming to Oregon to stay in a Harry Potter house? Like, is that, is that the experience that people want in Oregon? Like just theme. It doesn't, it doesn't give you something unless people that matches the experience that they're going to that location for.
Nobody's going to pay a premium just to like go to Harry Potter house if it's like in the middle of nowhere. You know, it's just like, what is this now doing it outside of Harry Potter world. That's. That's a different story. Right?
So, but again, you can't call it Harry Potter and you can't put anything in there that's too specific to Harry Potter. Or you'll get a, you'll get a very nasty cease and desist from an attorney.
[00:18:41] Speaker A: So what do you say? Just Wizard House?
[00:18:45] Speaker B: Yeah, you can call it Wizard House, but you can't put anything in the house, and that is too specific to that franchise.
Now, if you look online, there's a ton of people doing this.
[00:18:56] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:18:57] Speaker B: And they're, they're all in violation. Like, they could all get a cease and desist from, from Warner Brothers and be in very big trouble.
[00:19:04] Speaker A: Good to know. Good to know. Well, okay, so that was a big segue. Back to the, the data part. Almost to the deadline part, but back to the data part.
What are some common things that you see when people come to you and they're like, oh my God, my bookings fell off?
What are some common issues outside of, okay, we need to fix your photos, we need to fix your, your listing description. Like, what are some other common pitfalls that people might fall into?
[00:19:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I would say, number one thing that we've been seeing the last couple years is pricing. So let me, let me explain to you how the algorithm works with Airbnb and why you fall off a cliff generally. Now there's, there's, can, there can be other reasons that you fall off a cliff, but generally it's, it's, it has to do with pricing. I'd say the vast majority of it, because when the saturation started to happen in 2023, maybe 2022, I'm not sure when it started, but it was about that time frame.
Supply increased, demand increased a little bit, not as much, and pricing got compressed. So nightly rates dropped quite a bit from most areas.
As a result, anybody who did not follow got reprioritized in the, in the listing. So when you have a lower price than someone else, you're less likely to get clicked. Right.
And that click is what tells Airbnb that you're relevant. And relevance is what puts you on the top of page one.
So if you're getting clicked and you're getting booked, you'll be on page one.
But if your price is just not quite as attractive, you'll start to fall and fall and fall and fall. And it will be the self fulfilling prophecy because the lower you fall, the more you fall because you're not being seen and you fall off that cliff. So a lot of times we're able to fix those problems really quick by doing a short term pricing strategy where we get a little bit more aggressive to get those clicks and those bookings back. And then once Your velocity comes back up. Then you can start to get aggressive again with pricing. But it usually takes a short term price cut just to get back in the algorithm.
Now I will say pricing is not like the first thing we usually approach. Like we don't want to just slash prices to get somebody on top of page one. What we always want to do first is optimize the listing itself to present the best listing possible. Because then you can charge as much as possible. If you just cut your price, you might have a horrible, you might have horrible photos. And yeah, you can get it booked eventually if you lower the price enough. But if you just improve your photos, you might actually improve your click rate and your conversion rate enough. The perceived value goes up. Right. So we always want to try to fix the listing with the listing itself, if we can, before we mess with pricing. So that's, that's step one. And then, but usually it ends up being. It comes down to pricing in the end.
[00:21:59] Speaker A: Gotcha. Okay, that makes sense. And, and Luke always suggests that to people too. The drop your prices for a minute and then, you know, get, get some bookings rolling in and then, and then pick them back up. And people always criticize. I'm like, well, Luke just says drop your prices. Well, no, not forever. Just for a minute to wake the algorithm back up and get you where you need to be.
[00:22:20] Speaker B: Yeah, we call it the sacrificial lamb. So we have, we have an algorithm that will price properties for. For them. And what it does is it looks at days on your calendar that are getting less traffic in terms of click traffic and that kind of thing. So when people search on your listing, we collect what dates people are searching for for your listing. So dates that are getting less searched will usually drop those days more in order to get those, get that click traffic up, get that conversion up. Because the chance of booking those were slim to none anyways. It's usually those random weekdays within the calendar, but those end up becoming the sacrificial lambs that help the whole ship float.
[00:23:02] Speaker A: Love that.
So let's talk about some other features so we know, okay, this is like we're going to the doctor to get our listing fixed. What else do we need to know about intellihost that we haven't that maybe I haven't asked about?
[00:23:16] Speaker B: Yeah. So step one is the booking funnel dashboard, which, like I said, shows you kind of what the problem is.
And then once you know what the problem is, you click see recommendations and it shows you what you can do about.
Basically tells you These are the levers you can pull to fix the problem.
Then you go and you do those things. And we provide what's called a change tracker. So it automatically picks up whenever you've made a change on your listing, and it puts it right there in the dashboard for you. So you can see, okay, when I made this change. And we recommend you give it a little bit of time before and after so you can see the result. So you make a change, we pick it up for you, we list it in your. In your dashboard, and then you can see the graph and how that change impacted your listing. Did click rate go up by what percent? Did first page impression rate go up by what percent? So again, step one, what's your issue? Step two, here's some things to fix it. Step three, did it work or not?
And that's. That's. That's the listing optimization part of it. And then we have a separate tool within the dashboard called predictive Pricing, which. Which helps with the pricing aspect after you've optimized your listing.
[00:24:24] Speaker A: Okay, love that. So it's like a dynamic pricing tool, that second part.
[00:24:29] Speaker B: So the, the second part, there's two options. There's like a Do it yourself, which shows you your calendar, and it shows you how many clicks you're getting. It's. It's like a heat map. It shows you which days are getting the most clicks, and it calculates how likely you are to be booked for any given day for the next 90 days. Oh, so it says, okay, your 90% chance to be booked on this Friday and Saturday. So you might want to raise your price, because 90% chance, hey, you might as well get a little more money for that day. And these weekdays over here, These are like 3% chance of booking. So I want to drop my price on those. And so we have an integration with Price Labs where you can just click on the day, click up $5, hit submit, and it. It pushes to your Price Labs account so that you don't have to go there. Yeah, so it's. It's pretty convenient. So that's the do it yourself option. And then we have an algorithm if people want to sign up, where we do all of that pricing adjustments dynamically so that it's just hands off. And that's been pretty successful as well.
[00:25:26] Speaker A: Okay, well, this. That's really cool. I didn't realize it integrated with Price Labs like that. I thought it was like a separate tool. That's. That makes it a lot easier.
[00:25:33] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, we're trying to. We're trying to work with Wheelhouse. They don't have as much functionality in their API yet, so we'd love to integrate with them once they have the ability to do what we want to do, but not quite there yet.
[00:25:47] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, before we move on to the last three questions of the show, is there anything that I haven't asked about IntelliHost or your journey that you feel like our listeners would benefit from hearing.
[00:25:58] Speaker B: Such a great question?
I mean, I would just say one thing. We always say the one thing we live and die on is data. Just, you know, trust the data. There's just. There's so much. Right now, if you go online and you search, like, how to optimize my listing, you'll find blog articles, you'll find influencers, you'll find tons and tons and tons of opinions. But I've never seen any of these articles give data and statistics on why they're recommending that thing.
And when we actually pull the numbers on most of the recommendations, they're usually not very well backed by the numbers. So we're collecting tens of thousands of listings right now in intelligence, so we're able to see what actually works and what doesn't.
And we put our videos and our research on YouTube so people can just go benefit from that.
But it seems like there's just a lot of myths and theories out there that people are spending a lot of time and energy on that don't actually make a difference. For example, change your cover photo every week or frequently. Right. Changing your cover photo and changing your pricing and making tweaks constantly will somehow boost you in the algorithm because it'll tell Airbnb that you're more of an active host. None of that is supported by data. So if there's one thing I could tell your listeners is trust the numbers. If somebody tells you something, especially an influencer tells you how to hack the algorithm, treat it with a dose of skepticism, because there's. You need a lot of data to be able to confidently say the things they're saying. And I don't know anyone with more data than we have, and not even we can say confidently, definitively how the algorithm works necessarily. So just. Just keep that in mind.
[00:27:47] Speaker A: Yeah, it's like the.
Like, I can't. I can't think of the word. The common problem with everything, nobody knows how any algorithm works, whether it's Instagram. Everybody's trying to figure out how the Instagram algorithm works, how the YouTube algorithm, how the Airbnb. Everybody's trying to figure out all of These things and nobody can know. It's a secret, It's a mystery. Life's great mystery.
[00:28:07] Speaker B: Of course, I mean they're going to keep that so secret. Why would this influencer really know? He's got like three properties and he made one change and he's got a booking from it. So he's like, gu, I know the secret. You know you're like.
[00:28:18] Speaker A: Or no properties even.
[00:28:20] Speaker B: Yes. Sometimes you see that too.
[00:28:22] Speaker A: Yeah. So awesome. Well, cool. Well, thank you for coming on, Jeff. And we've got three questions that we ask everybody who comes on the show at the end. So first question, what advice would you give 20 year old Jeff?
[00:28:35] Speaker B: 20 year old Jeff.
Wow. I didn't come prepared for that, that question, but 20 year old Jeff, I would, I would tell myself to learn, to just never stop learning.
I've like coming from then to now, I've realized that education is free.
Like real education, real important information is free. And to fill yourself with as much of it as you can.
The things that I have learned have added the most. Like from, from 20 years old to now have added the most value to my life. So never, just never stop learning, never stop being a learner and just soak in as much as you can on whatever you're passionate about and you'll find yourself doing the things you're most passionate about.
[00:29:28] Speaker A: Great advice. Second question, what advice would you give a new short term rental investor who's looking to get started today?
[00:29:37] Speaker B: So I have some really like specific tactical things because we've actually been asked this question before a lot. And if someone was like listing their property for the, for the first time, I'd say there's a few things that we recommend you do with your listing that get, that really give you the best chance on Airbnb. And Airbnb seems to have what we call a grace period where at least for the first 14 days of being listed, you appear higher on first page or appear more on first page. So it's really this, this, this window of time where you've got to perform really well. Airbnb is looking for what we believe are two, two big things. Your click rate and your conversion rate. And this tells again, Airbnb how relevant you are. And that kind of pegs you where you're going to be on the search result going forward. So in order to get the most click rate and the most conversion rate, make sure that you're listing. Sometimes people will just like list their property with like some ghetto photos just to kind of like put it up there for a little bit. I don't recommend that like go when you go live with your listing, put your best foot forward.
Also use the lowest minimum night stay you're absolutely willing to do. Like this is going to sound, I know this is like, this is controversial, but if you can do a one night minimum, don't do it during spring break. You're gonna have some problems, problems with that. But like do a one night minimum and get as many five star reviews as you can. Drop your price like 25, 20, 25% below the competition. So you get tons of bookings, you're gonna get flooded, you're gonna get one nights, you're gonna get two nights, you get everything. And it might be a headache for a couple of months, but what we find is after about 20 reviews, you're getting the benefit that you would get from having roughly 100 reviews. So like going from 0 to 20 reviews is most of the impact that you're going to get from having reviews. So get all those reviews as fast as you can and just be really aggressive with those that first month. And after that point, you know that's kind of your investment. And then after that point you can kind of move to your two night minimum or whatever and start to be a little bit less, a little bit more picky.
But that's the best way, I think, to start on Airbnb. Just pull out all the stops. Get as many books as you can until Airbnb are irrelevant. And then, and then, and then play the long term game.
[00:32:01] Speaker A: Very good advice, very technical advice. Love that. Very specific, very specific.
[00:32:05] Speaker B: Probably not as not what you're looking for, but.
[00:32:08] Speaker A: No, love it, love it. And last question. What's your favorite book that's impacted your mindset?
[00:32:14] Speaker B: My mindset.
Grit by Duckworth. Can't forget her first name.
She has a TED Talk on grit. Have you ever, have you ever read Grit?
[00:32:28] Speaker A: No, I haven't.
[00:32:29] Speaker B: Such a good book.
Talks all about.
She did a ton of research on what led people what was the most indicating variable to success.
And they looked at IQs, they looked at emotional IQ, they looked at all kinds of things. And the one predictor of success that they could find was grit. Meaning to define it would be kind of the ability to work consistently year after year on the same thing until you're successful and not chasing the shiny object. And so that's been something that's definitely affected my mindset for sure.
[00:33:12] Speaker A: Well, I'm gonna go pick that one up. I have not read it, but I've got a long drive riding shotgun tomorrow to my parents house to take the kids for spring break. So.
[00:33:22] Speaker B: Angela Duckworth, I think that's her. I think that's okay. Yeah, I'll check it out.
[00:33:26] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, Jeff, thank you so much for coming on. If our listeners want to find you, follow you, all that fun stuff, how can they do that?
[00:33:33] Speaker B: Yeah, you can email us at supportintellihost. Co. So it's conut.com or you can follow us on social media. So Instagram, YouTube, Facebook.
Like I said, our YouTube has tons of educational content that we put on there. We do tons of research. We put it up there for free for everybody to just benefit from. So if you want to know what the numbers say about the algorithm and click rates and conversion rates, it's all there. So you can create a free account on our website. If you wanted to start tracking your data for free for 30 days, you can just go to intellihost.co and create an account. So I recommend anybody go do that.
[00:34:12] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, again, Jeff, thanks so much for coming on. This is a really interesting interview.
[00:34:16] Speaker B: Awesome. Thank you, Avery.
