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00:00:57] John: Morning Mateo, how are you?

[00:00:59] Mateo: Brother I am fantastic as usual. How are you man?

[00:01:03] John: I’m good. It’s it’s busy. I’m recovering from poison ivy again. This year, I just can’t, it, I’m like a tractor beam to poison ivy, so the back of my

[00:01:13] Mateo: I don’t understand how this keeps happening.

[00:01:16] John: so my garage, I don’t know either, my garage has all these vines covering on it, and it’s on the back side.

[00:01:24] John: that I don’t see. It’s like right on the lot line, right? So I don’t see that side of the garage. And it was starting to come up over the top of the roof. And I’m like, all right, we got to go cut this back. And half of it was like a certain type of ivy that isn’t poisonous. And then half of it, I’m just ripping it down, right?

[00:01:39] John: And I have gloves on, but I’m ripping it and I’m like, oh shit. I think I’m in it. And I go and get my wife and we, and I bring her out here. I go, is that poison ivy? She goes yeah. And then,

[00:01:50] Mateo: moving forward, no IV. Or unless,

[00:01:53] John: yeah, I’m done. I

[00:01:54] Mateo: get a hazmat suit,

[00:01:55] John: don’t know. See, like I get it doesn’t even matter. All right. This is not about poison ivy, . We have a great guest episode 113 of the no BS Podcast. We’ve had this guest on before, but new venture, new, exciting times. Brooke Pfautz, thanks for joining the show, man. Excited to have you here.

[00:02:14] Brooke: What’s up fellas, appreciate being here. And John, just stop rolling around in the woods, tell us the truth, you’re a tree hugger at heart. You’re just rolling around in the Ivy out

[00:02:22] John: can’t.

[00:02:23] Mateo: Probably in a way that I don’t want to imagine. So just go ahead and do your thing, but no, but thanks for being such a great friend of the show and we’re excited to have you back on. Always a great conversation. So looking forward to getting into it with you today.

[00:02:36] Brooke: Absolutely.

[00:02:37] John: So before we dive in here I want to talk about . So my wife and I have this joke that every time that you and I conversate Brooke or I talk about Vintory or the image that I’m seeing of you right now, basically my wife’s phone with AI blows up with Facebook targeted messages for her.

[00:03:02] John: For Vintory with you in your white hat talking about Vintory, and that’s not what we’re talking about today a little bit But it’s she’s oh you’re recording with Brooke She goes, that means I guess my phone’s gonna just have like for a month straight She’s gonna be Vintory targeted messages to me and she’s like Why?

[00:03:22] Brooke: We have created a new technology platform that allows us to track and listen for your Amazon Echo devices. Anytime you talk and you mentioned the word Brooke or Vintory, that you are just, you’re screwed. You’re going to see our

[00:03:34] John: Oh she’s eye rolling at me this morning when she knew that this is who I’m recording with today.

[00:03:39] Brooke: Tell your wife, I’m sorry. Apologizing in advance.

[00:03:42] John: just, she’s

[00:03:43] Mateo: Hey man, Tech Tools.

[00:03:45] John: Yeah. It works.

[00:03:47] Mateo: you get out there. It does. It definitely gets out there.

[00:03:50] Brooke: a pretty good marketing team for sure.

[00:03:52] John: Yeah, it works. Yeah, shout out to your marketing team. Good some some good players there. Why are we talking today? Let’s talk, for those that have listened to the podcast before, we’ve had you on, we’ve talked, we know your story. I guess real quickly, let’s do a super quick five minute Story recap.

[00:04:09] John: Those that didn’t hear your previous podcast with us it’s over a year ago now, probably close to a year and a half ago. You started out, in the funding world and then you were the president and CEO of Vantage Real Estate. This is back in 07, right? And you were there for five years.

[00:04:26] John: You went over to Full House. Tell us your quick abridged version of your story

[00:04:31] Brooke: I’ll go super quick. So yeah, I was in mortgage banking out of college. I had probably one of the largest mortgage banking firms in the Baltimore, D. C. area. We all know what happened in 2007. Ended up somehow taking a huge pivot into short term rentals. So started a company called Vantage Resort Realty in Ocean City, Maryland.

[00:04:47] Brooke: Didn’t know anything about vacation rentals, but grew that company pretty fast. Grew it from zero to 500 properties in five years. Sold that business in 2013. Then I was a Chief Business Development Officer for a large property management company down in Orlando, helped them expand did that for five years.

[00:05:04] Brooke: Then finally, after living out of a suitcase for 10 years, my wife came to me and said, Hey, when are you going to live with me and your two little blonde daughters? So I ended up going to work for LiveRes for two years where I was head of sales and marketing, but I was able to do that for my home office here in Baltimore.

[00:05:17] Brooke: Did that for two years and then said, you know what? One of the biggest pain points I hear from everybody out there is growing inventory. There weren’t any companies that were doing it. There wasn’t any company that talked about inventory acquisition. Even to this day, if you register for an event at VRMA, there isn’t a category for inventory acquisition, which I still think is absurd.

[00:05:36] Brooke: But anyways, I digress. So yes, I

[00:05:39] John: Hey there’s a lots of things that we think are absurd with that, but that’s a whole other podcast.

[00:05:45] Brooke: But just realized it was the biggest pain point out there. It was something that I was really passionate about, something I was, blessed to be pretty good at and something that I really wanted to tackle. Decided to start Vintory about four and a half years ago. And the mission of Vintory from day one has been to do one thing and one thing really well.

[00:06:00] Brooke: My father always said, Brooke, riches and niches, be the best in the planet at one thing. So I said this is the thing I just happened to really be passionate about, so maybe we should jump in on it. Launched it and it’s been a rocket ship ever since. We’ve helped close to 700 companies, 700 companies, with their inventory growth efforts.

[00:06:17] Brooke: There’s no other company that’s done as much as us and it’s it’s been a quite a ride. Our platform, just real simply, it’s… It’s a couple things. The first is we’re a data platform. So we are the largest database of vacation rental targets on the planet. So these are the homeowners you want to go after.

[00:06:32] Brooke: So we get that information from various different sources. We get it from scraping the OTAs. We get direct APIs with all the county courthouses. We’ve got a team in the Philippines that do nothing but go get public records and go and get vacation permit data. We overlay all that data together. We append it to get emails and phones and mailing addresses and social profiles and all that good stuff.

[00:06:53] Brooke: So you can target those people. And then we’ve got a marketing campaign engine that allows you to target them via email, via direct mail, via digital, and then we’ve got this really cool CRM and marketing automation platform that kind of helps you nurture and close those leads. So hopefully that wasn’t too long winded.

[00:07:09] John: No, it’s definitely not. We’re at VRMA and you had a booth and you’re talking about this new thing, this new venture of yours and it is called Comparant. Compar rent. Comparant. Talk to us about that, that’s why we’re here, right? This just went live you made a big splash on social late last week it’s pretty brilliant and.

[00:07:31] John: It’s one of those things like everyone says, Oh, it’s one of these ideas that why hasn’t this happened for years? Why didn’t I think of that? It’s one of those type of ideas. And it seems like a no brainer, right? It seems Oh shit, you’re right. This should have happened years ago. Talk to us about that.

[00:07:47] Brooke: Yeah. And it’s funny because it seems like the best business ideas are always those ideas, the ones that are like, duh, why didn’t this exist? Or why didn’t I think of this? Those are the best business ideas. Look, I’ve been passionate about this thing called inventory acquisition forever.

[00:08:00] Brooke: You know what I mean? It’s been really for the, my entire career, 16 plus years of being in the short term rental space. But it’s one of those things where. There wasn’t a channel that helped you as a vacation homeowner to go and shop and compare for professional management. And it was so funny because I remember, especially when I found advantage, we had a real estate division and technically they weren’t supposed to recommend us.

[00:08:21] Brooke: They technically by law, we’re supposed to recommend at least three companies, but there wasn’t even a website to send them to. The only thing you could do is literally send them to like Google maps, and say, type in vacation home management or property management, or that’s the funny thing is like, there’s no.

[00:08:35] Brooke: Nobody even knows what to call us. Like half the time they call us property management. Half the time they call it vacation rental management. Half the time they call it Airbnb. So nobody even really knows, what it’s called. So just realized that this was a need. I’ve had this idea again, probably close to a decade in my head.

[00:08:50] Brooke: Obviously Vintory came first. But I’ve always had it in the back of my mind and just said, you know what? The time is right to do this. We have the database. We, the hard part is getting the data and really what we, if you think about it. We have, it’s a marketplace. And this is, we haven’t done anything that’s never been done before.

[00:09:06] Brooke: This has been done in every other vertical. This is not a novel concept, right? This has been done in every other industry out there. All we’re doing is doing it in the short term rental space. We were positioned better than anybody on the planet to make this happen. So I would have been so pissed off if somebody else launched this, before me.

[00:09:21] Brooke: And like I said, the time was right. So again, in essence, what we do is we have it. We have the, at launch, we have over 5, 000 professional Vacation Rental Managers on one website. This has never been done before, but not only do we just have those property managers, we have all the information you need behind the scenes.

[00:09:39] Brooke: We have their contact information. We have their websites. We have their Airbnb reviews. We have their Vrbo reviews. We’ve got their Google My Business reviews. We’ve got all their Airbnb metrics, their Vrbo metrics. So if you’re a vacation rental homeowner. You can go on to Comparant. com and you can type in your market and you can see a list of every single property manager in that market and you can see all their key metrics.

[00:10:00] Brooke: So now then you can make that decision. Now, who do you want to talk to? And what I love about this is it levels the playing field. It’s going to allow some of these smaller companies to shine. I’ll give you a perfect example. We’ve got a partner that one of our first listings with Comparin that verified his listing Steven over at Myrtle Beach Destinations, he’s a new guy.

[00:10:18] Brooke: He literally launched a year ago, signed up with Vintory, shameless plug for Venturi. He’s grown from 0 to 52 properties in one year, but, and he’s got like four, he’s an Airbnb super host. He’s a Vrbo premier host. He’s got 4. 9 stars on Airbnb, Vrbo, and Google My Business. He is a killer property manager, but nobody’s ever heard of the guy because he’s new.

[00:10:39] Brooke: He’s brand new. But now, this levels the playing field. This allows Stephen to compete against all the big boys, and it shows his metrics next to everybody else. Real reviews from real owners on what he’s done and how, what a great job he’s done. I think, and one, by the way, this is 100 percent for free, and we can talk later about how eventually we’ll monetize it, but you will always have the ability to update your listing, highlight your services, and we can talk about some of the different things that you get to do in there, For free, 100 percent for free.

[00:11:09] Brooke: And again, I think we’re leveling the playing field. I think we’re creating something that’s never been done before that allows Vacation Rental Homeowners to shop and compare all the different Vacation Rental Managers out there and let the best ones rise to the top.

[00:11:21] Mateo: Yeah, I think it’s a I love the idea, but again, you’re pushing innovation using technology in a way that like when I first saw it, and I was actually on the site earlier today, because I’ve been looking around and actually, with what I do it’s super useful, right? Finding great managers, you can vet them.

[00:11:39] Mateo: But we remember, right? Remember when we all met together at in in Gatlinburg when a company called Rented. com and Vacation Futures, they started, they tried to do something in that vein before I got on. I remember it was like the, they described it as like the match, the match.

[00:11:54] Mateo: com for homeowners and property managers, but it was no, It was not even remotely as sophisticated as this, right? And it didn’t give you the information, it was super manual, and you had to, basically trust the middleman and the third party to verify these things that you actually put in one place.

[00:12:11] Mateo: And it really does level the playing field because now it’s about execution. Now it’s about, if I’m a manager, I’m a good manager. I run a good business. I can execute. My owners love me. Now I can get out there in a way and be found in a way that is going to grow their business exponentially, especially if they perform.

[00:12:28] Brooke: Yeah, the best property managers are going to rise to the top for sure. Now there’s gonna be a lot of people that do not like me and I’m okay with that. But it’s as long as it’s elevating the industry, as long as it’s making everybody better, I’m okay with that. There’s gonna be some some property managers out there with 3.2 stars, and don’t wanna highlight it, but you know what, we’re not like, we’re not making this information up.

[00:12:47] Brooke: This is public information that’s already out there. We’re just consolidating it and putting into one place, and then giving an avenue for your owners to leave reviews. That’s all we’re doing now. Going, I actually had the pleasure, Mateo of demoing , Andrew McConnell from,

[00:13:03] Mateo: Shout out to Andrew. Yeah,

[00:13:05] Brooke: So I actually had the pleasure of demoing him this at the conference and he thought it was brilliant.

[00:13:09] Brooke: He loved it. But he also said it’s different because two things. The first thought that came up to me is there’s a quote from Mark Andreessen with Andreessen Horowitz. He says, There’s no bad businesses, just bad timing. And I told him to do that and he appreciated it.

[00:13:22] Brooke: But anyways, but he said he took it from a different angle. He went in from more of a homeowner perspective. First, they didn’t have data on the property managers. So they would get the homeowners and they would bring them and then they would allow the property managers to bid on those properties. So I’ve heard this comparison a couple of times.

[00:13:37] Brooke: They’re like, Oh, Brooke, this has been tried before, rented, tried this, or Vacation Rental Futures tried this, it’s not going to work. And I’m like, it’s a totally different concept,

[00:13:45] John: You have the data

[00:13:46] Mateo: very much so a different product. It was a different, it was super manual on that side too, right? It was like match. It literally, that’s how it was described to me. It was like, it was almost like a forced dating site.

[00:13:56] Brooke: With a bidding

[00:13:57] Mateo: Yeah, with a bidding concept to it. And yeah, I think, but that’s the evolution of, of ideas, even within this space, right?

[00:14:03] Mateo: It’s not the same product that you’re putting forward, right? And what you’re putting forward is truly a game changer from an information standpoint. What you get when you click on that site saves so much time and energy for someone that doesn’t have the time to do, deep research. It will cut their time to find what they’re looking for in half.

[00:14:22] Mateo: And that’s a game changer. So

[00:14:24] Brooke: Thank you. And it gives the ability for the Vacation Rental Manager to highlight their services. They can highlight what sets them apart. One thing we’ve done is we actually created the top 10 questions, I don’t know if you remember, but I did a post a couple of months ago on LinkedIn about what are the top questions you should

[00:14:38] John: Brooke. How can we forget?

[00:14:40] Brooke: Yes. So I pushed that out there and I consolidated all that information. I had my own list going into it, but I massaged it a little bit based on this data and what we did is we created the comprehensive list of the top 10 questions that every vacation rental homeowner should ask, but they don’t know what questions to ask.

[00:14:58] Brooke: So what do they always ask? What’s your commission? Then it becomes a race to the bottom. And the commission is probably the last, the least most important thing that they should be asking. They should be asking how they handle guest damages. They should be asking how you do revenue management. They should be asking how you do all these other things before they even get to commission.

[00:15:14] Brooke: So we give the Vacational Manager the ability to update that information and explain it in a clear, concise way. So it’s not just focused on commission. It becomes a race to the bottom. Again, 100 percent for free, by the way.

[00:15:26] John: What I’m really excited about with this is, and you mentioned this, but I definitely want to talk about this more, is the cream rises to the top and we’re going to go ahead and you’re going to see these property managers that are A, unhappy about it but then what are they going to do to fix it?

[00:15:44] John: How are they going to go ahead and pivot? And bring them, or are they going to go ahead and pivot and bring themselves? They’re going to have to. And so overall, this is a hundred percent setting a standard that needs to be met. And those that aren’t meeting it they’re getting showcased in not a, such a positive light, which is so positive for our industry.

[00:16:05] John: And it’s been necessary for a long time. And I’m excited to see, I don’t want, the follow is the wrong word, I’m not excited to see a follow, I’m excited to see how these companies pivot and how they change and what actions are they going to be doing to get to the next level, to get to that top level.

[00:16:25] Brooke: Yeah, look, Airbnb, the review system, and Vrbo review system have forced me to be a better vacational manager for my property. So I’ve got one property in Bethany Beach, Delaware, and I know I’m a super host on both categories, and a VRBO premier host. I know if I get, fall below that, Threshold, I’m not going to be that super host anymore.

[00:16:45] Brooke: And I will work a little bit harder. I’ll give you a perfect example. I was at my niece’s engagement party. It was a Sunday night. And of course, wouldn’t you know, the toilet starts overflowing. They can’t stop it. So here I am outside trying to fix this. I guess this is a shameless plug for using professional management as opposed to self managing like I do, but Anyway I digress so but here I am outside I’m tackling this entire thing and I’m working a little bit extra harder because I know I might be Getting a poor review because of this situation and that made that makes me a better property manager It really does so I think the same thing is going to happen here You know that your you know, reviews are going to be public this information is going to be out there it’s going to, again, elevate the entire industry and make every property manager just a little bit better.

[00:17:28] Mateo: I’m going to get you a shirt. I’m going to get you a shirt, first of all, because there will be people that are mad. But again, like they’re going to have to step their game up, but I’m going to get you a shirt with a mirror on it that says, if you’re mad and then you just go look in the mirror, Because that’s what it’s going to cost people to do.

[00:17:43] Mateo: This is not the same game anymore. Like you have to step your game up. There’s too many options out there. There’s people that are in this business for real. They’re going to offer best in class management. And they’re going to want to grow their businesses. So you’re going to see people start making those decisions in drove.

[00:17:57] Mateo: Do they want to be here? Are they committed to being here? Are they going to do what it takes to actually raise their business to the level that it should be that does make us better as an industry, right? And or they’ll fall out and their businesses will fall out. So yeah we do got to get that shirt though

[00:18:13] Brooke: I actually thought originally, and I still may change this, but the idea for the logo is going to be a big spotlight. Because that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re shining a spotlight in the dark corners. You know what I mean? And, what do they say? Sunlight is the ultimate disinfectant.

[00:18:26] Brooke: And that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re shining that light, allowing everybody to be very, transparent. And have all that information out in one spot.

[00:18:34] John: Do you think Comparant will motivate homeowners to start looking at other options? Do you think that this is going to be like homeowners are going to get on here that are with a certain property management system and they’re going to go, Oh shit overall that, my property manager has a 3.

[00:18:53] John: 9, but just down the road, there’s a, 4. 2, 4. 5, 4. 7. I really should be talking to them, for whatever reason, I’ve been loyal to “X” property manager for years for whatever, do you think that this is going to start I really looking at yourself as a homeowner as well?

[00:19:09] Brooke: Who, who knows, but I think ultimately, you’re probably not going to, you’re only looking if you’re a little bit disenfranchised with your current management anyways. So if you’re not really happy with your current management, then you might start poking around, you might find it and we will be, driving traffic.

[00:19:22] Brooke: We can talk about that in a second, how we’ll be driving traffic to it. But realistically, I don’t think you’re going to find it unless you’re A, the property management sends you the link to, fill it. Or if you’re looking for property managers and, hopefully from an SEO perspective, we’re listed up at the top where they end up doing it.

[00:19:36] Brooke: So I, I would say no, but you never know.

[00:19:39] John: I was just going to ask you that with Paul and all on your team how are you going to be driving traffic? Like where, what’s your marketing campaign? How are you getting this in front of people? Other than, coming to our podcast.

[00:19:51] Brooke: Of course. So from marketing homeowners to this website, look, I’m being very transparent to our partners that sign up with it. It’s not an overnight thing. Like it doesn’t just, you don’t just launch a website and instantly you’ve got millions of page views and things like that.

[00:20:04] Brooke: So it’s going to take some time, but again, it’s free. Highlight your services, get on there before. Your competitors and the way the sorting algorithm works initially out of the gates, it’s based purely on profile, if you’ve verified your profile, and then profile completeness. So those are the kind of the things that kind of get it sorted to us at top. Then it’ll all start working on homeowner reviews. The way we’re going to be driving traffic to it. Remember, we have the largest database of property managers. We have the largest database in the world of the key strong homeowners.

[00:20:33] Brooke: So we already have this data. This is what we’ve been doing. at Vintory for the last four and a half years is pulling this data. I think we have 8. 5 million absentee records. We have emails for many of them. We have social profiles for many of them. We, just like we’re targeting, your wife, John, like same thing here, we’re going to be, she’s now, she’s going to be sick of me because of comparing, I’m sure,

[00:20:51] John: Yeah.

[00:20:52] Brooke: So what we’re going to do is obviously we’re going to buy a lot of ad spend. We’re going to be doing a lot of email marketing directly to those homeowners. We’re going to be doing a lot of digital marketing directly to them. Our digital marketing team is really good. And when you have the data, when you have their contact information out of the gates, when you have their names, their addresses, their emails, and the phones, you can do some incredible stuff.

[00:21:11] Brooke: We can literally do targeted ads directly to them as they’re on streaming devices, as they’re watching Hulu or watching whatever. And I know. That they own a vacation home in the southeast of Florida. It’s amazing some of the type of stuff. Some of our marketing team John.

[00:21:26] Brooke: Here’s the thing. Google from an SEO perspective over time loves review sites. So this will become, organically, this will become the place, that sorts to the top. Again, we’re not doing anything that’s never been done before. If you look at the software review world, like Captera and G2 are two huge examples.

[00:21:44] Brooke: And they sort very high all the time organically because they have those reviews. And Google search algorithm loves review sites. We’re gonna be doing some really cool interactive content. We’re actually going to be doing awards and badges. So now you can think about it like and again, this is all early We don’t know exactly how to flush out but think of it as like the Inc.

[00:22:03] Brooke: 500 We can have the Comparant 500, the Top 500 Property Managers, Vacational Managers in the US. Maybe we can even have market leaders. Maybe we have fastest growing. We have these badges and awards that you can do and you can use, but think about how that benefits you when you’re selling, when you’re going head to head against another vacation rental management company, and you can say an unbiased third party validated us and called us one of the top property managers in our market.

[00:22:28] Brooke: That, how’s that for credibility?

[00:22:30] John: It’s like the Forbes 30 under 30, it’s similar. You get that badge and it just drives traffic because you’re that example you gave earlier of, that cat that had, grew to 50 units in a year and, wasn’t known, but now, he’s obviously can parent badge,

[00:22:45] Brooke: fastest growing.

[00:22:46] John: Yeah, it’s fantastic. yoU mentioned people are going to be unhappy because it’s shining that light, that spotlight on them. Have you had any, like negative feedback like at the show where you’re like, Oh, holy shit, Brooke, why are you doing this? That kind of stuff.

[00:23:00] John: Has that come out yet?

[00:23:02] Brooke: Yeah no, no negative feedback. The only thing, look, this is an MVP, minimal viable product. And as as Mark Andreessen or Reid, I think it was actually Reid Hoffman said with LinkedIn, he said, if you’re not embarrassed by your MVP, you released too late. So I, maybe we did release too late cause our MVP is pretty damn good.

[00:23:18] Brooke: So the idea is to get it in the hands of the users, learn, adapt, iterate, make it better. And that’s what we’ve done. Look, there’s some little bugs and snags here and there. We just launched two weeks ago. It’s but little things like, claiming the listing, review process, Approving, reviews and stuff like that.

[00:23:36] Brooke: We’re trying to work through those bugs because it has to be trusted. And people have come to me and says if I get a poor review, are you going to take it down? I’m like, if it’s a legit review, no, I’m sorry. I got, we got to honor it. Now, if it’s pretty obvious that it’s coming from your competitor, because we can approve their reviews before they go live.

[00:23:53] Brooke: And we can ask if we need to like some validation to prove that they actually were an owner in your rental program. There’s some steps we can do in that review process. But look, we’re new man. This is a new business. This is a startup and we’re, working through those kinks as we go. But I just think it’s a pretty, pretty damn good MVP right out of the gates for sure.

[00:24:11] John: Interesting thing too, we’re talking reviews, right? You’re scraping reviews anyways too, right? So if you’re scraping from, the big ones, the Googles, the Verbos, the Airbnbs already, right? So then you’re getting your own reviews on top of it. So truly, it’s going to be pretty hard.

[00:24:26] John: You get that owner review that comes in eh, I wasn’t really loving it. The other reviews are going to go ahead and, and show a similar type or, it Could flush that out. It’ll be pretty, pretty hard when you get all like super hosts or like premier, like style reviews.

[00:24:41] John: And then there’s like a two star owner review. Okay. And then you could flush out ahead and say, okay, there, whatever this one owner had had for whatever reason, they had a beef or whatever. And that’s easy to go ahead and flush out.

[00:24:51] Brooke: Studies have shown that people trust a 4. 7 to 4. 8 star more than they trust somebody that has five stars because when all they see is five stars they think it’s fake. So it’s actually a little bit better to get, be down a little bit lower. It’s, yeah, so get those owner reviews.

[00:25:06] Brooke: We’re not going to filter out the bad ones. We will try to filter out the fake ones and fraudulent ones though.

[00:25:11] Mateo: So speaking about that though, is that a tech play? . Don’t give us a secret sauce, but with your vision and I know you being an innovative person, like that’s gotta be some type of tech play

[00:25:21] Brooke: So initially, look. As Brian Chesky says, in the early days, do things that don’t scale, until you figure out what it looks like. So in the early days, it’s going to be a manual process. We’ve got a person on my team that’s doing that. She’s reviewing and approving every single review that comes in.

[00:25:35] Brooke: If something looks a little bit, fishy she’s going to pause before she’s going to do it. She’s going to validate make sure that, that they really were in the rental program. Ask for some kind of proof, ask for maybe, just a, an owner statement, maybe ask for a screenshot, logged in to their to their platform, something like that, just to make sure that their competitors aren’t leaving, bogus reviews.

[00:25:54] John: Smart.

[00:25:55] Mateo: That’s an interesting play too. I didn’t even think about the competitors like getting in there and trying to do

[00:26:00] Brooke: You can’t have a podcast without talking about AI. I’ll talk about how we’re going to leverage AI for this. And this is actually probably not that far away. When I say not that far away, I would say by, my, my estimates are always quicker than my dev teams, call by Q2, Q2 next Q2 next year, we are going to have an AI sales chat bot built into every one of these pages if they choose to.

[00:26:21] Brooke: And if you think about it, we’ve got their metrics, we have all the reviews. We have all their information. We have their description. We have their FAQs, the top 10 FAQs, their answers to those, all those questions, we can even ingest their management agreement and imagine now there’s this little AI sales chat bot that can answer any question about their management.

[00:26:42] Brooke: Program when they’re on that page and now it becomes this virtual sales rep. It’s never calling in sick It’s never calling in hungover. It’s answering it perfectly and truthfully every single time You can even if you want coach it and guide it on different sales styles So maybe if you want the challenger method, maybe you want the justin michaels method.

[00:27:01] Brooke: Maybe you want whatever Maybe you want a sleazy used car dealer’s method, whatever method you want, you get to choose and this sales bot will sell your program. It’ll sell it perfectly every single time. So literally while you’re sitting there sleeping, hopefully you’re getting management contracts.

[00:27:15] Brooke: So you guys are a little bit younger than me. You may be not remember this, but in the early

[00:27:19] Brooke: days,

[00:27:19] John: Not much, man. Not much.

[00:27:22] Brooke: In the early days when I first launched Vantage I, we had to book every single reservation. We had to literally answer the phone and we had to literally book it, take a credit card by phone. And then over time, a couple years later, we ended up having online bookings.

[00:27:34] Brooke: It was the greatest feeling in the world when I would walk in the morning and I had three new reservations in my inbox. And I was like, Oh my gosh, I never spoke to this person. I didn’t have to pay a commission to my reservationist. Like it’s instant money. And to me, that was like just this incredible feeling.

[00:27:49] Brooke: And then obviously now it’s that’s all that happens. But I envision that new management contracts become the exact same way. Imagine Mateo walking in and you check your email in the morning. You’ve got two new management contracts sitting in your inbox. Now, you still have the rights to approve that property.

[00:28:06] Brooke: You still have the right to inspect that property, say no to it, and things like that. But think how you just changed the buying process now. So rather than this six week or six month or even a year dance of trying to get this person, they’ve done all this due diligence in the beginning.

[00:28:21] Brooke: And this is what’s happening with, it’s called information asymmetry. When you give the information to the buyer, you’re giving them more power and they do their research in advance before they even reach out to you. So they’ve done all this research, then they’re reaching out to you when they’re ready to sign.

[00:28:35] Brooke: So it’s going to really shorten the sales cycle here too. And hopefully, eventually it ends up coming to the point where you’re waking up in the morning and in your inbox, you’ve got a new management contract and you never even spoke to the person.

[00:28:46] Mateo: Yeah, that’s game changing.

[00:28:48] John: When you first started talking about that, I don’t know, but then, because needing to vet, right? But of course, it makes sense. They’re just getting the information. All right, here, this person, this homeowner would love to work with me. Now I have all this information. I can go ahead and vet them and see if they’re a good fit for my program.

[00:29:07] Brooke: tHe dynamics changed here, right? Traditionally, the seller, or in this case, the property, the vacation home managers, they’ve had all the information. The buyer here, the vacation home owner, has had to call every single one of these companies. Get that information. Get, ask them their questions.

[00:29:22] Brooke: Again, they don’t even know what questions to ask. They have to get the management agreement. They have to do all this vetting and then they make the decision. It’s why most people, the first company that actually answers the phone is usually the one that gets the contract. We have more data on this than anybody.

[00:29:35] Brooke: And we see time and time again, most people aren’t even answering the damn phone because you know

[00:29:39] John: pick up your damn phone. Answer your phone.

[00:29:41] Brooke: They’re wearing 18 different hats. They’ve got so many different,

[00:29:43] Mateo: they’re managing.

[00:29:44] Brooke: yes. And they can’t do it. We secret shopped a hundred management companies. We inquired about vacation rental management services.

[00:29:50] Brooke: They only picked up the phone 34 percent of the time. Then we left a message. You know how many times they called us back? 57 percent of the time they called us back. If you just. Do the basics, blocking and tackling, you’re going to beat your competitors. It’s like that quote 80 percent of success is just showing up.

[00:30:06] John: Yeah. It’s yeah, a hundred percent. And so when on the software side of things, if I get a, an inbound lead, my goal is to get back to that inbound lead. If it comes in, if I’m awake and I’m there, I don’t care what time of day it is, I’m replying within five minutes. I got a demo.

[00:30:22] John: It’s that simple because you’re responsive and they’re always like, holy shit, I filled out this form here. I did this two weeks ago and no one’s gotten back to me. What? Like you’re just sitting on it. It’s the same kind of, I don’t get it.

[00:30:34] Brooke: Mark Roberge he’s the former either Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot. So he’s like employee number three at HubSpot. He’s now a Harvard professor on sales. And he says, if you connect with a lead immediately or call them back within two minutes, you are 10 times more likely to close it than waiting just one hour.

[00:30:51] Brooke: And you’re 10, 000 times more likely to close if you wait one day. So pick up the damn phone.

[00:30:56] John: Yeah. It’s it shows a lot about who you are as a company as, as what you’re going to deliver in the future. You’re responsive. If I’m buying something, I want somebody that’s responsive.

[00:31:06] Mateo: It’s interesting though, right? Because like our business is, and I, and it’d be interesting to get your perspective on this, but because a lot of times our managers, like you said it earlier, they got 18 different hats on, right? But what you’re giving them is the ability to level the playing field with that, right?

[00:31:20] Mateo: So now they can actually do that because a lot of property managers don’t have time. The ones I talk to daily, like they’re swamped. Even if it’s not peak season, they’re doing everything that they have to do in the off season, like they’re always running something and they’re not sitting at their desk a lot of times, right?

[00:31:36] Mateo: Just looking at emails and responding. If they have a team, awesome, right? Then that gives them a little bit of bandwidth, but a lot of these people are running real slim and don’t have resources to be able to actually action those items, in a timely manner. So that’s actually a really good point.

[00:31:51] Brooke: I just had a guy cancel yesterday and on Vintory. And I was like, dude, what are you doing? So I logged into a system that, cause we’re a CRM and marketing automation platform. He had 34 new leads in his inbox untouched. And I was like, why are you quitting? He goes, there’s just not the ROI there, Brooke.

[00:32:10] Brooke: 34 untouched leads. Do you know what those things, at a, just a basic, like the worst close ratio out there, you would have paid for yourselves 10X. Honestly, this is why we launched, I’m not giving myself a shameless plug here, but this is why

[00:32:24] John: Yes, you are. It’s okay.

[00:32:26] Brooke: No, but we launched an outsourced fractional business development team.

[00:32:29] Brooke: And the real, we don’t make any money on it. The reason we did it was because to help, reduce our churn, to keep people on our platform. So that guy should have used our outsourced fractional business development team. Because what we do, we’ve done a regression analysis. Over the last, four years here, of the top property managers, what are the ones that are most successful?

[00:32:49] Brooke: And we leveraged, Steve Trover, Better Talent, we leveraged Predictive Index. And we found that there was like two or three profiles that outperformed everybody else, like three to one. So what did we end up doing? We just hired a team of nothing but those profiles. They’re called Captains. And Persuaders.

[00:33:04] Brooke: So that our entire, we call it like the SEAL Team 6 of of business development reps. And we do it, but like I said, we don’t even make any money on it. We do it just to keep people on the platform when it’s all said and done.

[00:33:14] John: I’m curious, talking about predictive index, what are those can you share what those three you said there’s three that

[00:33:19] Brooke: Yeah, so it’s Persuaders and Captains, and then sometimes even Mavericks.

[00:33:24] John: All right. I’m a sometimes even

[00:33:27] Brooke: Of course you are, you’re unhireable, magic.

[00:33:29] John: I’m a, sometimes even. That’s funny. I love that. No and what TROs doing too is so it again, just a whole other level, like on this bringing, leveling up our industry as a whole and bringing just quality people into the space.

[00:33:44] Brooke: Going back to what you were talking about before, Matteo, and comparing so if you are busy… And you are like, just, you don’t have the bandwidth to do this. Hopefully, Comparant becomes that vetting agent for you. Hopefully, Comparant becomes that agent that ends up getting those properties for you.

[00:34:00] Brooke: So you don’t have to do all the follow up. It lets, again you’re standing on your own by your merits and your metrics and what you’ve explained there. So let that, sales chat bot do the work for you. Or, again, hire Vintory outsourced fractional business development team.

[00:34:14] John: Super smart. Hey, Brooke, this has been awesome. We’re stoked that you’re, you’ve dropped this. You’ve soft launched or you fully launched. Like, where are we at with that?

[00:34:23] Brooke: Yeah, so this is you guys are the first this is the first podcast I’ve been. Of course, I wanted to talk to you guys first to get it out there. So honored to have you guys do that. So yeah, so we’re official. It’s live. You can claim your listing again. Go to Comparant. com, find your company, claim your listing.

[00:34:39] Brooke: If your listing isn’t on there, which it should be but if it’s not, you can just set up a new profile and go from there. And again, 100 percent for free. You got nothing to lose.

[00:34:47] John: Awesome. So that’s C O M P A R E N T. com. Comparant. com. Claim your listing, set your listing up. It’s free. Brooke, thanks so much, man. Appreciate you joining us today. I’m excited for you. Excited for Vintory and everything you’re doing.

[00:35:01] Mateo: And man, keep on there next, man. Thank you. Keep innovating and keep bringing new, exciting things that make us better as an industry, man. We appreciate you.

[00:35:09] Brooke: Thanks guys. Take

[00:35:10] John: Thanks, man.