"I use Truvi to win over new investors and homeowners" - US property manager
Cody Wood, COO of STR Accommodations, turned Truvi's safety and security features into one of his company’s strongest selling points.
‘I use Truvi to stand out and win over new investors and homeowners’ – US property manager
Cody Wood, COO of STR Accommodations, tells us how he turned Truvi’s safety and security features into one of his company’s strongest selling points.
Cody's STR Journey and Challenges
Cody started his STR journey as a humble house ‘hacker’ renting out a guest room in his home, before joining STR Accommodations as a business partner.
“We basically exploded. My partner brought 75 properties in which he was managing with little technology, operations or systems. He was always on the phone. He was going crazy. He was the definition of a hectic host. We dialled back to 60 properties and ended up making the same amount of money we’d made with 157. We realised quantity doesn’t always equal profitability. It’s finding the right properties, homeowners, and investors and investing your time and energy to make these properties the best.”
How did you find out about Truvi and what first attracted you to us?
We heard Truvi founder, Leo Walton, speak on Clubhouse, which prompted us to book a call with him directly. After the call, we were blown away and knew we had to find a way to integrate this service into our offerings.
To offer safety and security policies to our homeowners, similar to the OTAs was a game changer and the biggest concern they had with direct bookings. It has allowed us to build confidence and trust with investors and made it easier to move guests away from the platforms and into direct bookings.
Which of our product features do you use?
We use damage waiver and guest screening for direct bookings linked through our PMS.
Damages are the nature of this business. It’s going to happen. One of the things we were looking for early on was to make sure damage costs weren’t coming out of our pocket, or the homeowners’ pockets. We also wanted guests to take care of the properties.
The fact that we have the damage waivers for most reservations is one of our strongest selling points when we talk to homeowners or investors.
We are a hospitality company with a hospitality mindset. We don’t want to be chasing guests for money. So, it’s also great that Truvi handles the backend for us. We want guests to have a great experience, from the very first step they take in booking the property to when they leave. Without us having to go after them for small damages.
How is guest screening benefiting your company?
What I like about guest screening is that we don’t need to build a list of bad guests ourselves, which is always going to be hard to track at best. Superhog already has the info, and has a much larger database of guests than we have. They just tell us yes or no before the guests even get to our properties. We get notified directly in the PMS, so it’s a lot faster and seamless. It takes a lot of the pressure away from us.
Do you ever get resistance from guests to screening requests?
Not really, because we tell them upfront we have a 10 to 15 minute screening process. So it’s not a huge inconvenience for them. Whereas with some of the other ways we were doing it before, the process could take 30 minutes and it was stressful for them. Our goal was to make the guest journey as smooth as possible, Superhog has greatly helped us achieve this.
What is your best advice for running a successful property management company?
Map your business, the client journey, the guest journey, the property journey, so you can see the big picture of what you’re trying to achieve at each stage. This will help you grow your business for the long term. Whereas if you try to do everything yourself without having a business owner perspective, you set yourself up for constant chaos. You can scale chaos to some degree, but at some point it’s all going to come crumbling down.
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