A quick 300% increase in properties for this long-term turned short-term property management company
Meet Sun Paradise
When long-term rental property manager Diego Rosero purchased 4 vacation rental units in an ocean-side development in Hollywood Beach, Florida, he had no plans to manage the properties himself. After hearing price quotes from management companies in the area, however, he decided to try his company’s hand at short-term property management, and that’s how Sun Paradise Vacation Rentals was born.
They soon expanded from 4 units to 10 and before long, the building operators approached Sun Paradise with an offer to take on an additional 40, transforming them overnight into a full-fledged short-term rental property management company.
The Challenge
As any full-fledged short-term rental property management company knows, a software that relies on iCal to sync reservation information across different channels just isn’t going to cut it. The Sun Paradise team was struggling with frequent glitches in the software they were using, resulting in double bookings as well as an extremely complicated payment processor. All of this prevented them from expanding their distribution to more channels and boosting occupancy.
The Solution
The team began hunting for a more sophisticated and reliable property management software that would reduce their manual operations. That’s when the company’s accountant told them about a software one of his other clients was using – Guesty.
They found the Guesty staff responsive and customer-centric and, after completing a demo of the product, the Sun Paradise team felt they had found the ideal property management software partner.
The Results
While doing away with iCal and syncing their channels through direct integrations was the company’s main motivation for signing up with Guesty, Sun Paradise was pleasantly surprised by how much they benefited from some of the other features.
Whereas they used to have a team member checking and responding to guest messages 24/7, Guesty’s Auto-Messages allow them to limit their time spent reviewing messages to once a day.
The company notes that their favorite feature is the Reporting Tools, which not only save them heaps of time, but also help them prevent important information from slipping through the cracks. Before Guesty, sending regular updates to homeowners entailed logging into each channel and spending between one to two weeks compiling all the relevant information into individualized reports. Now, they can have reports ready and sent within two to three days. That amounts to a 90% decrease in time spent on a critical task.
As far as keeping them organized, Reports give the front desk staff immediate insight into check-in and check-out schedules for each day, eliminating the need for them to search by unit to see which guests need to check out and when. Additionally, the ability to include notes in reports enable the team to facilitate smooth interdepartmental communication.
Another feature favorite of the team is Guesty’s ever-expanding Marketplace, which led Sun Paradise to solutions like Wishbox, with which they can enhance their guests’ experiences and Beyond Pricing, which maximizes their occupancy and revenue with real-time, dynamic pricing. It also appeals to the team because of the direct integrations it offers to the biggest booking channels in the business, allowing Sun Paradise to majorly diminish their double booking issue and giving them the confidence to expand their portfolio.
The above, coupled with their ability to win over homeowners with their direct channel integrations, ultimately resulted in the increase of their properties from 50 to 200 while using Guesty!
Sun Paradise is proof that despite the operational differences between long and short-term rentals, an established long-term property management company can thrive in the short-term rental industry, especially with the right tools at its disposal.
