Unknown: 0:01
Hello, and welcome to the London property podcast, the home of super prime. Today we’re in conversation with Amit Soto, the CEO and co founder of gesi. Based in Tel Aviv. Well guess he started just shy of seven years ago. And that was out of my own unpleasant experience with my identical twin brother Coby. Were both of us were renting our own apartments in Tel Aviv. And while we were travelling, we try to, you know, rent our places on this new platform, Airbnb, I’m talking 2012. And our experience wasn’t that great. So we felt to ourselves like, there is no way Airbnb is exploding like they were, they were like, couple hundred million dollars worth back then. With so much work involved, it needs to be kind of like a lunch and forget service. And since we couldn’t find one, we decided to open one ourselves. And with that we talked to our friends started servicing their apartments, and submitted our idea to Y Combinator, the same incubator that Airbnb graduated from. And we got accepted. Ultimately, graduating and building guests dnn twin property management software that automates and streamlines the complex operational needs of any short term rental business across all major booking sites like Airbnb booking.com, vrb, o and more. And today we are we have raised $60 million to date. We have offices worldwide, including in London. And we have users in over 80 countries these days, successful short term rental businesses, and the like. Fantastic. And what kind of data do you produce and share? And who’s it mostly useful to? Yeah, so since COVID-19 hit, we have been reviewing our data very closely every couple of weeks, to gauge travel patterns that occurred and ones that we see in near future. And we have communicate these numbers to our users and the entire short term rental community by frequently publishing infographics and reports, as well as securing media hits to publicise these numbers widely. So the goal is to aid our users and professional hosts and property management companies in general in making well informed business decisions that helped them achieve stability and ultimately, longevity. And I’ll give you a few examples. So you know, coming up, we have a guide that will be published soon as a holiday booking patterns that we’re seeing over Christmas and New Year’s Eve globally. And a couple of that main insights I can share are, you know, though global reservation volume went up 5% in Fall 2020 compared to the end of summer 2020. We have looked at the booking numbers for upcoming holidays like Christmas and New Year’s Eve, and we’re seeing significantly less reservations, obviously that because most people don’t book that far in advance still without knowing what will happen with lockdowns. And that said More Bookings are definitely coming as folks are booking stays very last minute. So in September 15% of reservations across all major short term rental booking channels were made the same day, and over 40% of reservations were made within seven days of the reservation itself. And additional 30% were made within 30 day window of the reservation. And lastly, guests will also pay more to travel this holiday season. Though less people have booked stays thus far. On average, those who have are shelling out more cash when booking in are also reserving their accommodations for longer periods of time compared to last year. So we’re they’re trying to book longer stays in general. So basically people are looking for flexibility and last minutes kind of arrangements. And then on top of it all they’ve got to build into it the quarantines and whatever else they need to do. So they’re kind of mini relocations rather than holidays, I guess. Exactly. Exactly. So whenever they have such lock downs and things like that, they try to go away from their normal habitat into experience, different type of scenery, maybe in the in the vacation areas, or maybe even just experiencing different city what we call pretty much life shoppers. We call it our CD scrapers. So there’s a lot of different types of travel. I will talk more about it later. Okay. There was something actually in the in our last conversations with your colleagues, that destination isolation sounded like a really interesting twist on what we’re doing. We do have some employees right now who are doing destination isolation in few Greek islands, working remotely. And you know, just renting a full apartment for like a month or so working remotely there. You know, if you’re already stuck to one place, you might as well experienced different plays than you’re used to. Which is nice for the people at the receiving end because they in in some business in at the same time for longer periods. And less management, I guess. So what would you say is the biggest market for for guests See? So we do have many large markets, from Europe to the US to APAC. Of course everything is impacted by seasonality. Right now. It’s high season in In Australia, for example, and it’s as it’s summer there, one of the biggest changes we have seen that emerge from the virus is that individuals are booking longer stays, as I mentioned earlier, in across every market. And as such, we open the guest the platform to support extended stays of four weeks or longer after noticing that travellers who are booking rentals for longer periods of time. This helped our users incorporates flexible inventory, which is not just short, but also mid and long term stays into their portfolio to achieve reliable stream of revenue. As you mentioned, it’s helpful for those businesses. That meant providing users with a seamless integration to Airbnb monthly stay programme. And the ability to adjust prices, offer custom quotes, hold dates for different guests and apply custom rates, strategies to listings. So we are seeing different markets having different exposures to different type of travellers. And would you say what would you say is the most unusual market that you have? Yeah, so I can comment on the most recent unique pattern that I’ve seen merged from COVID. And after seeing many escape cities to be in more open and remote areas, we call those CD scrapers. And I mentioned this summer, we saw for the first time since March, people began booking again in major metropolitan cities. So this trend of renewed city goers can be credited to a multitude of reasons, including pent up demand for travel, with people needing a change of scenery, even in their own cities with a staycation or those living in the outskirts of cities, want to safely enjoy reopened restaurants and sites for a long weekend stays, or travellers who are keen to take advantage of low prices being offered on city stays like normally, in the middle of a city, it’s normally a multiple hundreds of dollars per night. And now you can find it at a much cheaper rate. And it allows people to experience different neighbourhoods of their own city, and maybe even try living in a different area altogether. So another pattern to note is that COVID has really resulted in redistribution of travel, especially domestically, areas that have perhaps never gotten as much attention are suddenly super popular. And it’s no surprise that rural tourism has become so popular as well. So it’s interesting that people are still getting attracted to the cities, but different different types of people at different price points. But he kind of missed that interaction with, with with with people. So I guess, you know, it’s not gonna it’s not going to change that attraction of wanting to go where the action is, is it even even if we’re all locked in? Yeah. And also don’t forget, people are still celebrating their anniversaries or their, you know, maybe even a wedding or sometimes the birthday of their beloved one, and they want to meet with their close family. And sometimes the only opportunity is in a vacation rental where you can rent the entire place, which is much bigger than your normal apartment. So there’s a lot of different types of travel is being distributed. And that’s part of the reason that short term rentals are actually experiencing an increase or have a recovery comparing to their normal fatality industry. Yeah, my Well, my family holds a building that we usually do long term rentals on and we started to put them on Airbnb because you know, you’ve got to pay your bills. And we noticed that a lot of the people who booked or inquired were actually family related visits coming for from other countries to visit their family locally, but then they can’t obviously stay with them or they need a bigger place, as you say, to all be together. So it’s it’s it’s interesting that you’re saying the same thing about your data. Why do you think rentals is poised to to grow after the pandemic? Yeah, so the short term rental like ecosystem is is poised for growth, and the major comeback as a whole will likely overtake hotels in 2021. So opting for short term rentals over traditional tail stays. This holiday season will be a trend we see among travellers resulting in a larger community ultimately considering and booking alternative accommodations not only in the near term, but also when the virus is the thing of the past. Right. So here’s why they are ideal for the main concern of travellers this holiday season and beyond will be safety. Right and this is why many will be booking separate accommodations versus staying with family. Given that everyone has a different anxiety and comfort levels surrounding the pandemic. Well, some travellers are extremely cautious and follow guidelines strictly other follow them loosely. So private rentals have lowered guest turnover, which already reduces the risk of exposure between guests significantly. And by nature private homes have less high touch surfaces in shared spaces, such as elevator buttons or door handles than crowded hotels. And this coupled with accommodations that limit human interaction, enable larger as socialisation Distance scattering will certainly be a deciding factor for holidays. Booking is private rentals can be accompanied by outdoor space to host the festive dinner for example, as well as a big kitchen to cook the actual meal in. Such accommodation is more suitable for high risk and dinner guests such as the elderly, who can enjoy at a distance much more than a hotel can environment good. And because of the aforementioned, I predict that many hotel goers will become short term rental converts during the near term, and for the long term in order to enjoy safe stays in the new destinations. So I definitely believe that we’ll see a much more strong recovery once especially once vaccine become available, but people would just try to gradually going back to travel, but doing it in a much more comfortable social distance. manner. Yes, no, I agree with you. I think that if I was to travel to anywhere, I’d be much more comfortable living, staying in an apartment than going to a hotel, and having to worry about who was in the elevator before me a minute ago, and so on. So also, for those who don’t know, obviously gessie enables you to manage your rental portfolio from one desktop and send it to all the different platforms such as Airbnb, how many of those platforms? Would you say there are the main ones? Would you say there’s a handful? 1020 100? What are we looking at? So it really depends if you’re looking at international otas that’s stands for online travel agents like Airbnb, booking.com, and the rest, or you’re looking at more regional, very niche otas, right. So they’re very different. If you’re looking at international, once you have a handful, sometimes they’re more, but they are under the same umbrella of these, you know, five big companies. And if you look at regional or niche ones, you’d find a lot more like over a thousands, right, then the reason there is because in many countries, you would find that, you know, I’ll give you an example, not just a dedicated one for a specific region, but a dedicated one for a specific region for a different type of persona, like, Hey, this is an otaa for maybe gay travellers, or this is one for people who go on bicycle trips. So this is very dedicated for bicycle trips across Europe, for example, or across a specific mountain that has a very big community for cyclists. So there’s a lot of different types of otas that are having their niche market. And I think during COVID-19, these markets actually expanded because people are looking more closer to home, and therefore are looking more domestically rather than the international websites that are used to so so they have the knowledge to know where to look and and find and then how do people like these little little operators find gessie? Or do you find them? What, how many of these otas are you actually connected to? Yeah, so we are connected to all the big ones. And we also have integration with channel managers that have connection to hundreds of those local regional ones. The property management companies that are our customers find us because they are looking for solutions, they are already swamped by many manual tasks that they have to deal with on a daily basis, either be managing their own relationships, accounting, pricing, their properties, publishing them across many otas, communicating with gas cleaning, and all that kind of stuff. So they look for solutions, they find us because we are one of the biggest one internationally, if not the biggest one international solution. And we showed them the demo of the product. And immediately they’re hooked on on the amount of time it saves them in the ability to not only save them time, but also expand their business. So so a lot of these businesses started with guests with five properties and grew with us to over a couple hundred properties over time. So yeah, I mean, when we came across guests, because we’ve got properties of our own in Spain, and we needed to have a bit more control remotely, even if we’ve got people on the ground. So it was really interesting to see how many different things we could monitor from afar using your system, which admittedly I haven’t signed up to, but I have started the process. So in your market, monitor and automate as well. So we only enable a lot of functionality, but also try to automate it to save you a lot of time. Yeah, so talking about that a little bit for people who are not as as tech obsessed as I am, you you basically you’ll be able to put your properties onto guests the and then manage everything from guest arrivals to automatic keys and price suggestions and so on. Can you tell us a little bit about the top sort of most fascinating bits that come in your marketplace? Yeah. So first of all, our we try to make a product that is an end to end out of the belief that you know, we’ve been a property manager ourselves when we started the company, and we felt there’s way too many times goes out there. And there needs to be one place that kind of like, synchronise everything. So we don’t have to juggle between 10 different tools. And the life of a property manager is super intensive. So you need to kind of like make it simpler, dramatically. So for one, you don’t just need to bring your properties to guest See, sometimes we can just connect to your Airbnb, pool your properties into guests, and automatically allows you to manage everything from there, even across many Airbnb accounts, including many booking.com accounts or whatever you have. Not only that, you can manage all your guests communication from one place, and not just on the channels themselves, but also on email, text messaging, and WhatsApp. So if you want to thank a guest, and ask them, Hey, you know, what’s your estimated time of arrival, or maybe even offering them an upsell of transportation from the airport, you can do all of it from the guests the inbox and even automate those tasks. So two days before arrival, you reach out to them and ask them to fill a form, or even offered them an upsell opportunity to have breakfast or have anything that they would like. So everything is get synchronised into one place and facilitate the life of a property manager. across many domains, I gave you just the the communication side. But there’s also the pricing side, there’s also the revenue management, there’s also the analytics and accounting. And like I can speak about our functionality for hours, I just recommend people to go on our website and register for a demo. And that will be the best solution. And my favourite by far was the noise management one. Yeah, so we do have a full marketplace with around 100 companies there. And several of them are noise monitoring one, so you have full integration into the reservation management. So the noise monitor knows exactly who is staying in the apartment and can monitor, you know, if they cross a specific threshold that you set and alert you about, these are the guests, and maybe even automatically send them an alert, hey, we’re getting this much noise from the apartment, please. Reduce dramatically, or we have to come by and you know, maybe even take your security deposit or something like that. So yeah, yeah. And so what what is the kind of London specific data that we can discuss that that you might have noticed? Is it being used a lot in prime central London? Or is it broadly across the whole of Greater London? How’s that looking? Yeah, so I gave you information about all of Europe in Europe posted the most reservations in October compared to all other gios. In fact, October reservations, volume in the EU was more than double what we’re seeing booked in November and December combined in the EU. And the average length of stay sits around 5.7 days, which is a longer average state than we saw pre COVID. The eight European cities that has the most bookings for the rest of the year thus far with be UK, London is second. San Diego they cut the same sorry for butchering that name where to go Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Edinburgh in Scotland is six in Paris, in Hungary, Budapest, Hungary is a so we’re seeing a lot of reservation volume globally keeps increasing month over month. And in September 2020, we saw a 5% increase in reservation volume worldwide compared to August, that said in the United Kingdom saw a decrease of 14%, one four in reservation volume, perhaps because the last month was heading into the second lockdown, which is what you’re experiencing and going to happen in Thursday. So but we still got three of the top destinations in the UK and your list. So we’re still okay, we’re still a destination that people want to come to. So is there any way that a long term property manager could adapt the system to use it? Yeah. So in fact, when COVID hit, we looked a lot about what our customers are doing. And many of them pivoted their inventory towards mid term stays, and even long term stays. And we have done you know, we are startup so we could change things really rapidly. And we’ve done all the modifications to our product to support midterm and longer term stays even side by side with short term stays. So sometimes you don’t convert the entire inventory. But you do, hey, I’m going to do 50% of my inventory long term now for like six months, and then I’m going to do a monthly stays for days inventory and short term stay for this inventory. So we support all of that on under one roof. Literally. And that’s that’s brings our software to be the go to place for flexible housing right So the go to place for alternative accommodation? Fantastic. Is there anything that you think that we should discuss that I haven’t covered? Well, I definitely recommend any property manager who is listening to reach out and ask for a demo. Even if you don’t currently offer short term rentals under your portfolio, I definitely recommend to register to our blog and read some of our material, because there’s a lot of things you can benefit from learning more about this ecosystem, and potentially even opening up some of your inventory towards short term or midterm housing, which will not only give you more exposure to the demand of the inventory, but also potentially increase your revenue in general. So yeah, I mean, I find that I’ve been in the market for 30 years. And I think that property management, both for buildings and individual Homes is, is really behind how things should be done. And, you know, to give you an example, there was an American company who we were acting for, and they came to try and buy a property management company, and then realise there aren’t any. There’s literally people do property management, because they have to, but nobody really does it on a large scale, certainly, when it comes to residential. And I think I think these days, there are a lot more than they had been 30 years ago. And and I think that part of it is the fact that the technology offers a lot more, you know, streamline access to this type of property management, and also lowers the barrier of entry to anyone who wants to do property management as their business. In short term rentals was also something very difficult to do five to 10 years ago, and then came companies like st and simplified a lot of the work load that these companies had, and lower the barrier to entry to any individual who’s just starting with five properties, or potentially an enterprise with 500 properties. So any anyone could be using, guest the to, you know, basically do this in skill. Okay. And when it comes to to a corporate landlord, who’s who’s who’s holds a portfolio of properties, it really makes sense for them to have what five plus properties to use a system? Well, I think if you if you have less than five properties, you are probably not a full time business unless you manage your own properties there. And if it’s not your full time business, it does require, you know, some learning or learning curve, and therefore, some investment from your side, I would definitely recommend using a technology player like SD for a full time business. And therefore, if you pass five properties, that’s where it becomes more interesting to you. And if you pass 50 properties, you almost immediately realise how much you can gain from using it technology like St. So and it can you can you do multiple locations as in if I was to sign up which I am planning to? I would want to manage? I’m going to come to that furnace. Yes, yes. And I’m going to use it for portfolio in London and also in Seville. So would I need to make many of our customers are cross countries and even cross continents. So we support multi currencies and multi languages on our platforms. So that’s not a problem at all. Great, fantastic. And the fee for it is a percentage of the income. Yeah, so we definitely have multiple fee structures depends on your scale, and also how many modules you take from the product. So I definitely recommend people to sign up for a demo and talk to an account executive who can quote them on the exact modules that they care about. But it’s it’s either fixed fee per month or a percentage. We have both modules so fantastic. Okay. Thank you, Tommy ad from gessie. And we hope you enjoyed that as much as we did. If you want more information you want to connect, email us info at London property.co.uk