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MTR company found home at Hostfully after burning through 4 PMS platforms
How a property rental manager uses Hostfully to operate all of her properties — short-term and mid-term
Kaitlyn Hough-Oaks a is manager at a property management company that services both short- and medium-term rentals.
Anchor differentiates itself from local competitors through its team of highly experience STR and MTR operators.
Overview
Before
- Spent countless hours manually logging bookings and managing payments
- Couldn’t find a platform that could handle her level of operations at her budget
- Limited marketing capabilities
After
- Grew her business by freeing up valuable time
- Manages payments and tracks leads without hassle
- Reaches leads through 70+ channels
- Makes business decisions with one-click Analytics
Impact
- Passive marketing led to huge impact
- Consistently saves time and resources
- Visibility has led to upcoming merger with another large-scale company in the VA rental market
“We can book someone in like 5 seconds. I can handle everything with Hostfully—and it takes care of the rest.”
Kaitlyn Hough-Oakes, Anchor Vacation Rental Management
Before
Manually managing mid-term rental properties with short-term solutions
Kaitlyn Hough-Oakes has been working in the vacation rental industry for just over four years. As she delved into the world of a mid-term rental market in her coastal Virginia home region, Kaitlyn realized the unique needs of MTR companies. It soon became clear to her that neither long-term nor most short-term management platforms were able to provide efficient solutions to MTR management.
As a mid-term rental manager, Kaitlyn can share a few words about her experience with long-term management software systems: “I do NOT recommend.”
While she found that longer-term management software providers allowed for easy payments, everything else was a major challenge—including a major obstacle: LTR solutions don’t integrate with Airbnb, through which Kaitlyn secures nearly 75% of her bookings.
On the other hand, Kaitlyn found herself overall disappointed with a number of the STR platforms. Her initial property management software (PMS) was too barebones and lacked the features to manage 40 properties at scale. The next two systems she tried were too expensive, and still didn’t offer the solution to manage MTRs. Finally, the fourth PMS was far “too techy” for her liking— not to mention, too expensive to justify the cost.
Before abandoning her efforts in the STR software space, Kaitlyn heard some solid recommendations of Hostfully through the vacation property grapevine. And after a few weeks of further research, Kaitlyn switched to Hostfully.
After
Smooth sailing with invaluable marketing capabilities and a key payment-processing hack!
So why Hostfully? After signing up with Hostfully at a comfortable pricepoint, Kaitlyn was delighted to discover the PMS afforded her the foundational system and tools needed to truly drive her MTR operations.
The biggest time-saver is Hostfully’s payment processing versatility. Because of the unique nature of MTRs—wherein a guest pays for a rental spanning multiple weeks or even months—payment coordination and tracking can be ongoing, and therefore more complex. With Hostfully, Kaitlyn has found she has enough flexibility to provide a flat rate with Stripe OR collect a percentage of the booking payment via the Hostfully booking widget.
While Kaitlyn still needs to manually record payments for large MTR bookings, Hostfully’s interface functions as a visual reminder, helping her keep an eye on upcoming payments and stay on top of those bookings. So now lapsed payments are a thing of the past. Kaitlyn finds that especially with units that bounce back and forth between short-term and mid-term bookings, nothing works better than Hostfully.
Bonus
Bigger wins coming
In addition to the visual appeal and user-friendliness of Hostfully’s interface, Kaitlyn was thrilled to discover that once she set up her business with Hostfully and the various connections therein, she could reach far more channels and leads than ever before, landing more guests with fewer marketing efforts.
Hostfully’s dashboard and new analytics features save Kaitlyn huge chunks of time each month. So now, with just the click of a button, she can review her company’s business performance.
And it turns out, her performance is better than ever: with a growing portfolio of nearly 50 short-term and mid-term properties across coastal Virginia, Anchor is in for smooth sailing ahead. And Hostfully’s sure glad to help the team hold steady as their helm.
