Managing a vacation home is not a one size fits all kind of business. Whether you are a first-time real estate investor, a second homeowner, or just someone interested in subsidizing your favorite vacation location, we start with the basics.

We start with finding out more about you and your goals.

• Do you want to stay in your home often or just a few days a year?
• Is it strictly a financial decision, and you prefer someone else to handle all the details, or do you want to be closely involved with every aspect?
• Would you like to renovate soon, or do you love it just the way it is?
• Do you have resources to update the home, or will they have to be generated from rental revenue?
• Do you want it to be something that stays in the family for generations, or are you likely to sell it in the future?

Questions like these will help move us toward crafting a custom plan that will assure as much as possible that your asset and its management provide precisely the result you desired.

Once we understand where you are and where you hope to go, we will begin the stages to bring it to the active rental market.

• Collect all the relevant information about the home and its stakeholders
• Create and collect signatures for the management agreement.
•  Register the property with the proper governing authorities.
• Take an inventory of the property to assess its guest readiness.
•  Resolve any issues or concerns that might prevent it from being ready for rentals.
•  Install Smart Home technology including, remotely programable digital locks, thermostats, and monitoring hardware.
• Build out the property and owner profiles in our reservation software.
• Produce photos and a three-dimensional walk-through tour of the property for marketing.
• Create and post a rate and fee schedule for the property.
• Publish the listing on our website with the property description, imagery, reservation guidelines, and house rules.
• Using API technology, synchronize the publication of the property across multiple national and international vacation home listing sites and integrate it with data services.

After the property goes live, we will begin the reservation management and guest services
which include:

• Communicate via phone, email, and text using our enhanced CRM with leads providing
  property details and promoting reservation sales.
• Verify guests and collect contact information.
• Collect payment, including fees and taxes.
• Ensure the acquisition of signed digital rental agreements before guest arrival.
•  Schedule housekeeping and inspections of the property before guest arrival.
•  Update the guest with pertinent information about their vacation home and when it will be available for check-in.
• Verify the guest’s arrival, providing check-in materials, including directions, property access credentials, and parking passes.
• Provide guests with local information about restaurants, activities, shopping, and city and
  beach rules and guidelines.
• Continue open communication with the guest based on needs and services through
  checkout.
• Verify guest departure and inspect the property.

During our ongoing operations, we will also provide the following for the owner.

• Provide essential non-permitted maintenance services at a low cost.
• Regularly replace HVAC filters, standard batteries, and light bulbs.
• Remit all taxes to the proper authorities
• Provide on-call after-hours communication and guest services for urgent matters.
• Deposit payment of rental revenues minus expenses via ACH or provide by mail with a check.
• Create and provide invoices with cost breakdowns and income statements.
• Provide the owner with an owner portal to place and monitor reservation data and access digital copies of invoices and statements.
• Keep advised on the owner’s behalf of all local regulations and ordinances relating to vacation rental operations and ownership.
• Continue ongoing communications regarding property concerns, damage, or status and provide access to resources to resolve issues outside our expertise.

Many tasks exist, from signing a management agreement to accepting the first booking. Our role is to make this as thorough, profitable, and painless as possible. Once the property is in the program, we will build a robust and engaging unit profile and segment the information available based on the end user.

As part of this onboarding process, we will use high-end scanning equipment to build a complete virtual walkthrough of the property and use the scan to create 2k static marketing images with the added value of a baseline for the property at the time of capture. The “virtual twin” is handy whether you are trying to demonstrate to the guest the location of the bathrooms or verify the furnishings and their placement at the time of capture.

While we are predominantly a “drive to” market, we also have distribution through several international channels, including Airbnb and VRBO. In addition, we will be listed on Booking.com along with six other niche market platforms, including products like HomeToGo, Whimstay, and FindRentals, among others, as of the first quarter of 2024 and some earlier than that.

In addition to this, as you are already aware, we have our website domain and market through more traditional channels such as email, paid search, and retargeting through Google, Bing, Meta, Savannah Chamber, and a handful of local specialty sites, including TybeeIsland.com.

We also use social media channels for distribution, including featured property posts, Instagram reels, etc. Our website includes enhanced features to capture guest information and increase conversion through tools like shopping cart abandonment and guest information capture pop-ups. Our email campaigns have segmented focus on various cycles of the guest booking path from inquiry to in-house and cyclical post-stay anniversaries.

All inquiries come to our centralized property management software regardless of the marketing channel. Once guests are confirmed, they must provide documentation of a valid government-issued ID and digitally sign a robust rental agreement outlining our specific policies and expectations for compliance with house rules, check-in and check-out procedures, and the established good neighbor policy. The vetting process also includes, with the scarce exception, contact via phone to establish a verified point of human contact.

Once the guest places the reservation, we have a sophisticated workflow of communication triggers that provide them with timely information related to their check-in and access credentials. In 90% of the properties we manage a smart home system is installed at our cost to provide us with automation for energy management as well as real-time access data which is stored, giving us the ability to know who has been in the property and when as well as remotely diagnose potential HVAC concerns.

We staff six full-time reservations and guest services agents available via multiple communication streams, including app messaging, SMS, email, and good old-fashioned telephone. We are open seven days a week with regular office hours from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM and expanded hours to service traditionally higher volume seasons and holiday or event-based date ranges.

We also have a staff of full-time support and operations team members, including maintenance, housekeeping, inspections, and media and technical services. We are city code compliant and have a phone that is carried at all times by either management or team leads, which is live 24/7 but intended to field urgent after-hours matters.

Should a maintenance or housekeeping issue arise before or after a guest stay, we have implemented software and strategies to ensure reported cases are logged, and the appropriate team member is efficiently assigned. We use automation and a hands-on approach to assigning everything from repairs to housekeeping and inspections.

As part of this protocol, we also conduct standardized cyclical property assessments, which are documented and stored to keep a timeline of projects from start to completion and keep an eye out for items that may require broader timelines to resolve. In most cases, we can address issues with in-house staff that keep costs below market averages for owners. In situations that require outside vendors and technicians, we have a deep stack of relationships that we work with regularly who often give us preferred rates which we pass directly on to our owners with no markup.

We are a trust accounting-compliant organization that collects all income through an industry-specialized payment processor. The exception to this is cash and check payments which are rare these days because of payment schedule requirements and cancellation policies. Rental income is dispersed to the owner by the 15th of every month for rentals for the prior 30-day period.

We offer an owner portal that allows the property owner to log in at any time and see the status of reservations and review all statements and invoice summaries related to labor or materials provided to manage the property. Our accounting team also facilitates the registration and compliance process coupled with required documentation, tax collection, disbursement, and reconciliation.

We also use a deep stack of software products that provide us with an enormous amount of data providing just about every key performance indicator available to assess the property’s performance. These resources also allow us to price the property dynamically based on pre-determined rules, real-time market data, and live consumer search and volume metrics, ensuring we generate the highest returns possible based on real-time market conditions.

In addition to our full-time team members, each department has a director or leader whose contact information is provided to owners at onboarding. You will also have direct access to the managing partners, so if a question or concern needs to be addressed, there are multiple qualified people and communication paths to accommodate. Many of our team members have been with us for decades and have a broad knowledge and understanding of how to troubleshoot and provide prompt solutions.