When thinking about how to increase their profits, many property managers will try to increase their bookings and occupancy. Some might consider aiming for more direct bookings, to earn more from each guest and avoid OTA commissions.

While these are great approaches, growing your inventory could be a faster and easier way to boost your revenue. In fact, vacation rental startup Vintory claims that adding 1 new property to your rental network is the equivalent of booking 100 new guests.

However, many businesses find that growing inventory is a difficult and time-consuming task. Vintory decided to solve this problem by creating an owner acquisition platform – the first of its kind in the vacation rental industry.

In this article, we’ll explain exactly how Vintory is helping property managers grow their inventory. And, we’ll present a case study with two property management companies – Koloa Kai and Stay Beach Cities – who’ve had success adding new properties to their portfolio with Vintory.  

Vintory is one of the applicants to the 2021 VRTECH Startup Competition! If you have a startup in the vacation rental tech space, submit your application now.

How does Vintory help property managers grow their inventory? 

Vintory is an owner acquisition platform that’s designed especially for property managers. It’s a CRM and sales and marketing automation platform tailored to the vacation rental industry.

Through this platform, Vintory helps property managers capture more leads, convert them into clients, and design and track the performance of marketing campaigns to grow their revenue.

Automate your owner acquisition

Using Vintory’s platform you can automate many aspects of client acquisition. Here are some of the tool’s automation features:

  • Marketing and lead nurturing: never miss a lead and make sure that all promising leads are nurtured and brought further down the sales funnel.
  • Texting service: automatically communicate with leads by text message.
  • Call tracking and recording: track all sales calls and record them in the platform for easy access.
  • Built-in e-signature platform: easily and quickly send management contracts automatically with drag and drop.
  • Pro forma generator: build pro formas using real market data so you can send accurate quotes to potential clients.
  • Hot lead transfers: flag the most promising leads and automatically pass them on to your sales team.
  • Voicemail drops: automatically leave voicemails for your prospects.

Generate leads with advanced marketing tactics

As well as the automation platform, Vintory also has a consulting element.

Their team of over 40 industry-specialised growth experts can help property managers with all aspects of client acquisition, including building marketing campaigns, running paid ads, retargeting and more.

They can even build you a dedicated landing page for owner acquisition.

Use data to power business development

A successful acquisition strategy should be powered by data. Using Vintory’s platform, you can track all your campaigns and focus your efforts on leads that are most likely to convert.

You have access to all your data in a dashboard that shows you social media metrics and tracks your performance and ROI on paid ads and marketing campaigns.

These dashboards help property managers take a data-informed approach to their growth strategy.

How Koloa Kai and Stay Beach Cities grew their inventory with Vintory

We spoke to Jed B. Stevens, General Manager & Co-Founder of Koloa Kai and Stay Beach Cities to find out how Vintory helped them grow their inventory.

The two companies manage a total of 14 rentals, with 13 located on the Island of Kauai and 1 in Laguna Beach, California.

They offer vacation rental asset management, which they describe as “all that traditional vacation rental management offers with an asset management approach”. 

Their customers have different goals. Some use their properties a lot and simply want to offset their costs, while others want to maximise their revenue from short-term rentals. So, they craft plans to help their customers achieve their unique goals. 

Jed says that, when they first started working together, Vintory helped them better understand their unique selling point.

“We had an inkling of what our USP was prior to working with Vintory, but through our onboarding process, we refined our focus and now have razor-sharp clarity on our USP.”

The challenges and the solution

Before working with Vintory, the company struggled to find the time and resources to dedicate to marketing and business development. Jed says that, though he knew what needed to be done to secure new clients, marketing wasn’t one of his strengths.

“It took me far too long to create materials that were just passable. Because it took so long, I didn’t have the time to do it on a regular basis, which led to inconsistent campaigns, which in turn degraded their effectiveness,” he says.

When he stumbled upon Vintory, he realised it could be the solution. 

He saw an interview with Brooke Pfautz, the founder and CEO of Vintory, on VRMB. In this interview, Brooke explained how Vintory approached the challenge of growing inventory for vacation rental property managers.

After watching this interview, Jed was sold.

“He covered all of the elements that I had already self-identified as necessary, and then went on to outline several other aspects that I hadn’t considered yet.  By the time I finished watching the interview, I had decided that we needed to work with Vintory,” Jed says. 

Forming a partnership 

Vintory wants to form reliable, long-term partnerships with property managers. So far, Jed certainly feels that the companies are working as partners. 

“Vintory has delivered on every promise they made (and more) to treat us like a partner at every step of the way,” he says.

When the short-term rentals industry was hit by the pandemic in 2020, Vintory offered their partners the chance to pause or delay payment of fees because of the disruption to business.

Even while their account was technically inactive, Vintory helped Jed and his team craft a special campaign for a new service they had come up with: Home Watch.

“The whole team, including Brooke, never once refused a call or disregarded an email because we were technically ‘paused.’  I knew then that we had really become partners,” says Jed.

As things slowly started returning to normal, Jed and his team decided to pivot and open a new location in Newport Beach, California. Vintory assembled a group of senior strategic advisors to walk through the plans and offer advice on several crucial aspects of the business. 

Jed says that they don’t just consider Vintory as a vendor or marketing firm. Rather, they consider the whole staff as part of their team.

A year of working with Vintory

After a year of working together, Koloa Kai and Stay Beach Cities have several active campaigns up and running in separate markets. Jed has regular meetings with their Partner Success Manager as well as their Director of Digital Marketing to constantly tweak and administer their marketing efforts.

And, they’re starting to hit their goals.

“My goal of having regular, high-quality marketing materials, systems, and practices across multiple platforms is now a reality,” says Jed.

In practical terms, that means they have campaigns crafted and ready to go for the coming 2-4 months, which will roll out on a regular basis. 

Although the campaigns are ready, they sometimes need to be updated depending on market conditions. Luckily, in Jed’s experience, the Vintory team is incredibly responsive to changes.

One of the key benefits of partnering with Vintory is that Jed no longer needs to worry about putting a system in place to generate new business. He’s confident that Vintory will make sure they always take the most comprehensive approach possible. 

Plus, having a dedicated team to handle acquisition allows him to direct his focus to other areas of the business.

Who is Vintory for?

Jed says he would recommend Vintory to “any Vacation Rental Managers who want to meaningfully grow their business.” 

He believes that there is no better company or solution that can deliver the same results.

Even if you aren’t yet ready for acquisition, Vintory can help you make progress in the right direction to start launching a growth plan.

So, for property managers looking to grow their portfolio, it could be worth finding out whether Vintory can help you achieve rapid growth with less work.

To learn more about Vintory, check out the full list of features and watch their product demo to decide if this solution is for you.

Keep up with vacation rental tech innovations

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