We need to have a talk!

Our industry is growing, and as property managers, it's our responsibility to help our owners grow alongside us. Have you had the hard conversation with your owners yet? Educated Owners = Happy Owners.

Every industry grows and matures, and the vacation rental industry has experienced quite a growth spurt over the last decade. (This is a great thing). However, as the industry matures, it is time for our conversations to grow and mature past the basics as well. The industry is more complex than putting a futon on Airbnb, and our language, metrics, and strategies must also become more complex.

Many property managers understand this and are growing past the simple terminology and strategies of yesterday. Still, the question that needs to be asked is, have you helped your owners grow alongside you?

As managers, owners have put a huge amount of faith in our ability to protect and provide profit from their property. Yet many owners still believe that the best measure of this success is the highest ADR, and, in the best case, they may understand some level of balancing occupancy.

We are doing a disservice and holding back our owners and ourselves by continuing to let them focus on these elementary-level metrics. These metrics are still important to track, but we know they are secondary to the more complex and important metrics like RevPar, ABW, and ALOS.

Helping your owners understand the complexities will free you up as a property manager to generate more revenue for the property, build trust between your owners and you, and spend less time fielding nervous owner messages and more time growing your business. But we as managers are responsible for educating our owners, whose insight and view of the industry is typically dwindled down to an end-of-the-year performance report.

Find time on your calendar to meet with every owner at least every year, or at least the ones worth keeping, to educate them on how the industry is changing, and don't dumb down the conversation. Be specific about your strategy with their property and how this strategy will improve their revenue or protect their property. Provide them with market insights for comparable properties even if they are performing worse. Use important metrics beyond ADR and occupancy and explain why these metrics are important. Expanding your owner's knowledge is critical to expanding your own business.