A 70% increase in properties & an 85% decrease in weekly work hours
Meet Tesseract
Throughout their 20s, Matthew Fischer and his friend Brian talked about going into business together. Three years ago, they finally decided to turn their words into actions and began managing a 4-unit tester property in Norfolk, Virginia.
To say they were green is an understatement. The new business partners had no idea how to furnish, price or advertise their rentals. They were familiar with Airbnb, but only as guests. Determined entrepreneurs, they began playing with different variables to see what worked and what didn’t. Eventually, they had something good going and were able to garner enough interest from investors to expand their portfolio to acquire an 8-unit property, bringing their portfolio to a total of 12 units.
While for a long time they operated as EF Capital, a private equity fund, in March of 2019 they evolved into a full-fledged property management company called Tesseract Rentals.
The Challenge
Like many young property management businesses, Matthew and Brian were doing everything manually, using unintegrated tools to help wherever they could. A graduate of Harvard Business School, Matthew knew the only way they could achieve their goal of scaling to 100’s of listings would be to automate their processes.
In the Summer of 2017, they began the hunt for a property management software and ended up going with one of Guesty’s competitors, a platform they soon found to be far too basic and lacking when it came to seamless connections with distribution channels like Airbnb. Along with a management software, they were using about six different platforms to run their business!
Still, they kept adding properties and even started moving more of their operations in-house to be able to provide a better guest experience. Expanding their listings and their workload ultimately led them to a breaking point when they realized their business could no longer function, and certainly not scale, without a completely integrated platform.
The Solution
This time, Matthew wanted to get it right, so he did a lot of digging into Guesty before signing on the dotted line.
As an active member of the startup scene, he heard about Guesty’s recent funding and that served as the confirmation he needed that Guesty was an industry leader and was going for it in a big way.
He researched everything from the members of our product team to our company roadmap, noted big company moves and hires, and of course, scheduled a demo, during which he was very impressed with the progress Guesty had made and its proven capacity to expand and enhance functionality in a short amount of time.
He was sold.
The Results
Time-saving tools like Guesty’s Unified Inbox have shaved hours of work off Matthew and Brian’s week. Whereas they previously spent 40 hours a week managing 25 properties, Guesty helps them run a portfolio of 43 properties in just five hours a week!
By reducing their workload, Guesty gave Matthew and Brian the space to focus on building their in-house team and training new personnel. Guesty pitched in here too, its Management App empowering each employee to access everything they need to go about their tasks without having to consult with Matthew or Brian.
But for Tesseract Rentals, implementing Guesty into their business didn’t just save time, it increased revenue. For one, their reduced workload allowed them to concentrate more effort on property acquisition and scaling their business. Additionally, with stronger channel integrations than their previous software provided, they were able to strengthen their performance on Airbnb and yield better reviews from guests. They were also able to reach more travelers by pushing their listings to Booking.com.
Above all, Matthew has enjoyed working with the team behind the product and his customer success manager. The transparency regarding feature releases has spared him from investing in manual workarounds and his customer success manager has helped him make his operations far more efficient by recommending best practices.
Matthew understands the perspective of new property managers. They have just a few properties under their belts and think the Airbnb game is easy. As they expand their portfolios, however, they’ll see that they can’t continue to do things the way the did early on or it will all fall apart.
“If your intent is to grow,” he advises, “make the jump early to an integrated PMS. I don’t think there’s any better than Guesty.”
