Latest / STR Unpacked / Why DIY AI Is Failing Property Managers with Georgina Kennerknecht Biosca
Transcript
- Ben: Hi and welcome to another episode of Short Term Rentals Unpacked ⁓ at Scale España. I'm joined here with Georgina. ⁓ Thank you for joining me. Thank you for giving us this opportunity. No problem at all. So you're obviously a founder CEO in the space. ⁓ I think a lot of people watching this look up to people like you as a way to see how they in their own journey can come to where you are. So I was wondering if you wouldn't mind sharing just a little bit about your journey of how you got into short term rentals and how you ended up basically becoming a CEO of a leading tech company in this place. Well, it was really unpredictable. I was getting into one. I've been all my life building systems for supporting decision making for big companies. I was a consultant. So I been doing Taylor software all my life. I always wanted to have my own product. But then when generative AI came into the picture, I realized it was like the whole world had to be redesigned by this technology. But of course, to start a company, you have to have a problem to solve. In that space, I was being a consultant and in the meantime, we had some family properties that my family didn't want to give to an external manager. So they trusted me to run it. But I was like, even though I'm an automation freak and I have done it, absolutely everything. The only thing I could not keep under control was those annoying messages. Yeah. Stutter day night, Friday, while you're having dinner, you would get like, I don't know how to use this. And it's like, ⁓ my God, seriously. I send a guide, I send you emails, I send you messages and you still have to reply this message. And all of sudden it hit me, I'm like, this is a perfect business case for this type of technology. So I started contacting friends that they were operating, it's just me, am I missing something or this is happening to everyone? And it was the case, everyone was manually replying, even acquaintance of ours that run 300, 500 properties, just texting manually, imagine what the rich can. So we decided, okay, now we have the problem, we need to solve. Yeah, and this is the technology, perfect technology to fit. So that's how we started. So you were a tool connected to the short-term rental industry at all. And actually you're quite new to it then. Yes, yes, yes. Because the technology that enabled this type of solutions is just two years old. Yeah. So we have started commissioning our tool six months ago. Nice. So we are super new. We've been developing for more than a year together with big property managers. ⁓ We integrate to the property management system. We get all the information. It's almost plug and play, but most important, we provide a platform that allows for every property manager to be able to talk to their clients like they would, but in automated way. Fantastic. So that makes we normally automate more than 90 % of all the communications and we get fantastic. reviews and customer satisfaction. mean, that's the killer stats, isn't it? 90 % and then really high reviews, I think is what everyone is going for. So I guess kind of like a word to the industry then, like going from where you were before to obviously being pretty new to the industry and presumably new to events like scale. How have you found it? I find it fantastic. I think it's very good moment. to be in the industry. think there's challenges, but he's getting much more professional. And I see that the efficiency and the try for ⁓ bigger operations to scale portfolios, technology is playing a major role in that. And events like scale are great places to learn to understand all the challenges of the industry, how to improve them and everything. So that's what it brought us here. Yeah, I think it's incredible. like one of the things that I love about the industry as a whole is just how like friendly we are. And it's true, we are professionalizing quite quickly. And I really hope that that that element of things ⁓ stays with us. So obviously, you created the product. How long have you been selling the product now? Six months. Six months. Six months. And remind me the name of it, sorry. Lili Ho. Lili Ho. Because one of your colleagues told me live like holiday or? so basically the point is if you want the property managers to live like holidays. Fantastic. So since they are in. I think a lot of property managers would love that. yes, I think we have to automate much more than that. The operation is much more complex, but at least when it comes to communications, we take like 90 % of the load. So that gives them the the time to actually bring people to where the most important where the revenues made and moving people from a call center to where revenue is and what is important to the operation. I think this efficient and a lot of property managers that we come across, they have these big plans and they really know where they want to get. But literally the complexity of the operation, because it's a decentralized operation. Yeah. It's very complex, hard regulations and everything makes them, does not give them the time to scale like they would. We get them the time. We also increase revenue. see an increase of revenue because of the upselling and closing. But I would say the most important part is how we clear the noise of the operation for them to be able to focus on the important parts of the operation that they make a big difference on their business and in their brands. And totally agree with that. think like a lot of particularly smaller property managers, have certain levels. I think I always think it's around like 15, 40, 80, 100 plus where, you know, up to 15, you can kind of do it on your own and then it gets a bit much. And when you need a bit of help and before AI and before products like yours, it was very difficult to get past that. And I think what you're doing is allowing people to basically break through that kind of those barriers and go for much more growth. which hopefully means more profitable property managers within the industry. ⁓ So at the moment, are you just a messaging, automated messaging feature or any other features as well that you have there? Well, we basically, not only automate messaging, also we're a 360 solution for communication. So we believe the best communication is where the guest actually does not need to ask anything. Everything gets to them at the right time. Right. Obviously, this is kind of a utopia. So it has to have some reactive message. And that's where I play a role that is very important. But I would say we have a very 360 understanding of what communication is. So we provide tools also to start conversations very granularly at the point of basically allowing you to talk with who you want, when you want, saying exactly what you want. And that cuts a lot. yes, that's our main functionality. We have a very ambitious roadmap. We will always be focused on communication because that's our core. So, ⁓ but we also have a whole task management area that derivates from this communication. basically, for example, if people is asking for extra towels or there's some maintenance issue, we also have an APA that creates all these ticketing and support operation, of course. We also notify everything. AI is fantastic. It can automate many things, but you have also to understand which are the limits. So for example, guests not being happy, it's something that needs to be personally handled. So we also escalate all those things. Well, that's something that I wanted to ask you actually, because say, for example, I was a optimistic property manager and I saw your product and went, that's very interesting. I think I can build that. What with vibe coding? Why shouldn't I? Well, I think you shouldn't first of all, because I think AI... It's not just, first of all, when you're talking about this communications, it's not just replying questions. There's much more than all of that. First of all, there's access to information and how you're building this, this information for your business. Your communication is a reflection of your operations. What happens? AIs that for example, are self-learning. They're very nice and it seems all very easy, but the problem is when you change your operation, You have to have traceability of everything that you learn to be able to adapt and to change because of how you were operating yesterday, maybe it's not valid now. A very clear example, you have like a coffee machine and it breaks and you change the brand. That was true yesterday, not true today, the brand that you used to have. So what happens when we start building, we... ourselves and you are not an expert on systems, it is very problematic because everything it seems very easy until it gets very complicated and knowledge management, traceability, security, GDPR compliance, because you're talking to the guests, guests provide information that it might be private information. All those matters have to be very carefully drafted and also traceability of what is happening. It's not just a message gets into a prompt and it gets replied. You have to have a control of your operation. You have to have traceability of everything that it's been said. You have to have all the safety to be able to manage. And of course, you have to scale. mean, if you have two or three apartments, that might work for a short while. Also another very important point, technology is constantly, constantly evolving. What we deploy, what we develop, six months ago, it's almost obsolete today. We are constantly investing, investing in keeping the tools at the maximum of their capacities, re-evaluating our models, our infrastructure. So if you develop yourself, first of all, you're going to be captive of a solution at that time. You're never going to be state of the art. You are completely dependent on that person developing your solution. And sincerely, has, think that it's fantastic that you try, but it has a problem of safety and continuity. It's so interesting, isn't it? Because I a lot of people, I know a lot of people, vibe-coding. I think it is somewhat of a drug. Like once you kind of realize what you can do, particularly as an entrepreneur, right? You're like, wow, I can build anything that I've ever wanted. And I think... one thing that people just haven't considered is like the security aspect or the maintenance aspect or anything like that. And I speak to a lot of people just implementing systems left, right and center, which, you know, might come invite them. So I think it's a really interesting point that you made there. And AI is just a part of it. AI is a very tiny part of it. For example, if someone asks, did my payment go through? You have to have a specific agent that makes a specific tool. that calls the property management system, reduce the information in real time to know if that information has been told. It's not just a prompting. How you retrieve the information, what we were saying, for example, our agent, you specifically explain, we get all the information from the PMS, but besides, you can add all the information and layer it. Like what you were saying, if you are managing maybe three, four properties, that's okay. But if you have 500 properties and you want to change something in your information, you cannot change one by one. That could be completely efficient. So that's why we have different structures of knowledge management at different levels that you can group. For example, for if your properties, are a presidential in-person check-in. These ones are smart logs. These ones are luxury. These ones are in this location. One property can be in different groups of information. So just by editing here, you will affect all the properties. and you can make these groups according to your operation. So we do not force you to operate like ⁓ our solution allows you to rather than we provide you with a solution that adapts to your operation. ⁓ And Enrique, your colleague showed me your system before we chatted. it is, what I love about it is it's the UI UX that you guys use is It's so clear. And I think that's something like, cause I see a lot of different systems on it is you'd be surprised how many overcomplicate relatively simple things. And I think the way that you guys have designed that product is it's so, is it idiot proof? I'm trying to think of a better way to describe it, but it is. like, it's it's a phrase that I like. There's no such thing as dumb user. There's no such thing as dumb users only dumb products. And it is an example of that because it is, think, anyone can go in and without any understanding on how to set it up and very easily work their way around it. Thank you. Thank you. It's refreshing to see. So you spoke about your roadmap earlier. Can we dive into that? Or is it super secret? No, it is not. It is not. It is not. It is not. Well, our roadmap definitely now it's bringing up voice very shortly. And our roadmap. it goes into really embedding what we want to do is to become the digital front desk basically. So everything we would like to be the facing part of the client and everything that it goes in operation deliver precisely as we said we still want communication but also communication to your team. So now we are developing more communication in words who gets what for example We have a system that, depending on the type of issue that is generated, if it's a request, if it's maintenance, it will send directly to the person in charge with the ticketing and all the information required. So basically we will not only talk with guests, our next step is talking and coordinating teams, cleaning and all the parts of communication of the operation. Why? Because it's decentralized. So in short-term rentals, we see more and more bigger portfolios and it's very hard to operate because it's decentralized, they're all in different locations. So basically the oil that makes your operation smooth is the communication to know exactly what is happening, what is demanding where and what is the efficient route to distribute through the system. that's where our roadmap is going. I think that sounds like an amazing. I know amazing vision and obviously you'll achieve that in very short time I'm sure. think kind of like final question for me is coming from external industries, more professionalised industries and having that advantage of an outside lens opposed to a load of us here who this has been our world for decades, some of us. How... do you think the industry is going to change in the future? Well, I think that depends a lot on regulation, I have to say. And that's very unpredictable because very human driven, very politically driven, which is not the most rational sometimes. So that's hard to say. But what I see is that we are seeing certainly a professionalization of the sector. People are using more technology. portfolios are increasing in size. I think also there's a very strong change of the preferred asset before they were very a lot of managers managing properties that they didn't own. And now we are seeing them getting hand by hand with ⁓ investment funds to actually develop their own type of asset. focused for short and rental apartments and so on. So I think that it's moving that way, more professional, more organized, bigger investments, bigger portfolios, where efficiency is key. I mean, it's part of the general life cycle of an industry, think, isn't it? And we're starting to get to that digger money, professionalization element of it. Fantastic. Georgina, thank you so much for talking to me today. It's been an absolute pleasure. So nice to meet you. ⁓ Thank you very much, the pleasure is mine. Thank you.