If you’ve been in the short-term rental industry for a while, well, you know that there are a lot of software programs to choose from to help you better operate your property. They’re definitely not all created equal. Some are better than others, but one thing is for sure, there isn’t one program that really does it all.

And so today we’re in an industry where it’s actually easier than ever to build software, but building software that really helps maximize your property’s revenue potential, that’s not quite as easy as whipping up a little project with your favorite AI coding tool over the weekend. 

Today we’re gonna talk about five programs that we’ve built internally at our company, Corsley, to help us manage hundreds of properties in a very efficient way that maximizes the revenue.

Before you tune out, these are five things that you don’t need to be partnered with Corsely to set up on your own. They are things that you definitely should be doing, and yeah, they might take a little longer without software, but you don’t wanna miss out. These are things that will set you above your competition.

Let’s break them all down

For those of you that are new to the channel, well, my name’s Tim Hubbard. I’m the co-founder of Corsi. My partner Justin and I have been at this for a long, long time, been running this show for over six years.

But together we’ve managed over 100,000 guests. We’re managing hundreds of properties in dozens of cities today, and these five tools really help us get a leg up on the competition. The first one is one that sits on top of PriceLabs. So most of you are probably familiar with PriceLabs. It’s one of the industry’s leading dynamic pricing tools.

We’ve had their founder on the show, and it helps you adjust your prices every single day. 

we’ve noticed that 

they don’t account for your review scores. And because we know with certainty that the better your reviews are and the more reviews you have, the more visibility you will get on all the booking platforms, and theoretically, the better your property should operate, 

the more money it should earn.

So it’s kind of crazy that these dynamic pricing tools don’t actually have that included, and so we built a tool on the back end that helps us analyze all of our properties with all of the market data, but also considering our review scores relative to the market

This means if our property has 100 five-star reviews and our neighbors only have one 4.8-star review, then we’re going to be pricing differently This also means if we launch a brand new property that has zero reviews, well, the prices need to be different for that property than they will be when that property has a dozen reviews.

And it’s really not as simple as just setting one price in the beginning when you have a new property and then changing it a few months later. Actually, what needs to happen is your price needs to gradually move with the performance of your property relative to the market. So all of our pricing decisions are based on how our properties are doing against the market, whether that’s this week, this month, this quarter, or this year, or any time out in the future.

We’re constantly evaluating our property’s performance against the market, and that leads me to the second tool that we’ve built internally to help us do this As we know, these dynamic pricing tools change our price daily based on seasonality and day of the week and events and all of those types of things.

But they’re changing our base price based on all those events, and if our base price isn’t set up properly, well, then we’re really starting from a foundation that isn’t accurate And so if we go back to a brand new property, for example, a brand new property with no reviews isn’t going to command as high of an average daily rate as an established property.

And so it starts out with, let’s just call it a base rate of $200. It starts to get reviews, and as those come in or as its performance outperforms the market, then we can raise the price on that base price

And that’s something that just doesn’t exist with today’s dynamic pricing tools. Yes, they adjust your prices every day dynamically, but they don’t adjust your base price. Yes, they do have options to evaluate your base price, but they’re not doing it automatically. So unless you are in there every day looking at the numbers and comparing against your market, it’s very likely that your base price is gonna get a little out of whack

And now this really helps us adjust for any situation. Let’s say you actually got a bad review. Maybe you just had this really difficult guest, and for whatever reason, they left you a three-star review, and you had a brand-new property that only had three reviews, and now your average went way down.

Well, your visibility’s gonna go way down too, and so that needs to be compensated for. And so the two really work well together, including the reviews and including the dynamic base price adjustments on top of everything that PriceLabs or your favorite dynamic pricing tool does. And so together, that combination is helping our properties outperform the market

If you’ve got a property and you’ve been looking for a little bit of help with it, or it’s maybe not performing the way that you were hoping, well, we’d love to partner up with you.

You can go to corzly.com. It’s C-O-R-Z-L-Y.com. The name Corzly comes from this idea of us being your core operating center, where we’re pulling all the levers, we’re pressing all the buttons, we’re talking to all the guests, but you own your property and you own your listings. We just help you on the back end

Okay, on to item number three, and this gets into the operations. At Corsley, we’re all about operations, and what we’ve found is that your cleanliness and your property’s maintenance really determines your review scores. That’s the number one reason you might get a negative review score is because of cleanliness or maintenance

And a lot of times your cleanliness or your maintenance team can do a really good job, but they actually don’t have the right information, or it’s not organized in the right way, or they’re not being managed properly. And so we’ve taken that off our partners’ plates, and we’ve incorporated a lot of tools to make sure that that doesn’t happen

You may have heard of tools like Turno or Breezeway, or maybe your PMS program, your property management software platform, has task management built into it. Well, what we’ve found, of course, is that a lot of these task management programs just don’t handle the full picture

For example, we use Breezeway. It’s one of the industry’s leading software programs, and it does a good job, but just like PriceLabs, it’s missing a few key components. One thing that’s really important is that all of the information that passes between your guests and your reception or yourself or your cleaner or your maintenance person, that all needs to be accounted for, and a lot of times it gets overlooked.

And maybe it’s in the form of a comment that a guest left in private feedback. Maybe they stayed at your property, and they checked in, and it’s a remote property that you’re managing remotely, and they said, “Hey, Tim, I loved your property. It was great. The, the location was amazing. Your response times were perfect, but there’s a little creepy-crawly cobwebs on your front door.

You should probably clean those up next time.” Well, unless I’m going through that and monitoring everything and sending all that manually to my housekeeper, sometimes those things get overlooked. Or maybe your front doorknob was just a little loose, needs to be tightened up. Maintenance items get overlooked all the time, and so what we’ve built on the back end is a way for that never to get overlooked again.

So we always have a custom checklist for all of our properties that requires photos before and after. It’s custom to the property, right? But it also incorporates this other feedback.

So if we had a guest stay at our property and they said, “Hey, there’s a couple cobwebs on the front door,” well, the next time our housekeeper shows up at that property and they open their checklist for that turnover, they’re going to see that item in there, and it’s going to be a requirement

We’ve actually built out all kinds of great technology. We, we also have a hub where all of our partners go to see all of these different items. But I don’t want to get too far down the rabbit hole, and I want to talk about just five things that you really should be doing with all of your properties or with your team.

And so th- that’s, that’s the first one when it comes to maintenance and housekeeping. You want to make sure that you’re really transparent with all of the feedback that you get. Another place that we see a lot of owners aren’t very transparent is actually with the cleaning reviews. So let’s say you had a comment directly in your cleaning review that said, “Love the property, but, you know, the bed wasn’t made properly,” or, you know, “The front door was dirty,” or whatever it happens to be.

Your housekeeper should be seeing these messages. They should also be seeing the positive messages, and so hopefully you’re sharing all those with them as well But this is something that just doesn’t happen automatically, and so we’ve built some tools to make sure it does

It goes a long way with your team. It’s not you saying, “Hey, Sally or John, you did a bad job, and, you know, I got a bad review.” This is coming straight from guests, right? And again, it’s both with negative and positive reviews.

If you’ve been in the industry for a while and you’ve been working with the same housekeeper, I hope you have been. My housekeeping manager we’ve been working with for over a decade now. That’s kind of crazy to think about. She helps manage all the housekeepers on the team for my personal portfolio. But if you have been working with someone like that for a while, well, you’ll see that they take ownership of your property, right?

They are in your property maybe more often than you are, and so they want to see this feedback. It’s important that you share it with them

Okay, one last feature that we’ve built out that’s made it a lot easier for us to make sure with 100% certainty that we never have a missed cleaning. That is a huge no-no. That’s the ultimate fail for a short-term rental host. But sometimes it happens, right? And so even if you’re using a task management software like Breezeway that sends a calendar, makes a calendar available to your housekeeper, we know that a lot of housekeepers or maintenance staff, they don’t like using software, right?

They don’t want another program on their phone. We’ve recognized that, and we’ve added some tools on top of Breezeway. So now our checklist shows up in Breezeway, but all of our confirmations are actually coming through on text message in their two-way, so this doesn’t exist directly in Breezeway. If we message a housekeeper or maybe it’s a housekeeping company that’s working for a property, and they say, “Hey, I’m not available,” well, right now, that message doesn’t make its way back into Breezeway.

Of course, if you only have one property, a lot of these things are, are easier to manage, super, super important, but easier if there’s less scale. The more properties you add, or for all of you property managers out there, you know that this is really important. Uh, and if the housekeeper doesn’t respond to the text messages, which also happens, then we’ve built out AI on the back end that’s actually gonna call them and say, “Hey, Sally, we sent over a confirmation for the checkout this Sunday.

Are you going to be there?” They can say, “Yeah, Tim, I got it. Sorry, I’ve been busy. I haven’t been able to make it.” They will talk to our AI, and it’s gonna program that in our checklist. Or maybe they say, “No, I didn’t get it, and no, I’m not available.” And then we’ve built out actions on the back end to make sure the backup housekeeper is getting that next message.

And so again, if you’re only operating one property, these things are easier to do, but they’re equally as important

That’s just a few of the things that we’re doing here today, and we’re building new software every single day. It’s super exciting, and we’re coming from experience, right? My partner and I have been investing in real estate for decades. We run dozens of our own short-term rentals, and so this is coming from our own experience, and it’s really showing up in the results

I didn’t really get into AI too much. We’re doing a whole bunch there. I’ve talked about it a bit in the past. If you’ve been enjoying the episodes, if you found them helpful, what I’d really appreciate a thumbs up. If you’re not subscribed yet, well, consider subscribing if you want more great real content like this.

And if you’re having trouble with your property or you want some help or it’s just not performing the way that you want it to, well, head over to corsley.com. I would love to speak with you personally or someone from our team. Till next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.