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Hospitable Property Insurance - Hospitable Town Hall, April 29, 2026 · Hospitable Hosts

• Miles: Hi there, welcome to today's episode of the Hospitable Hosts podcast. Today's episode is a recording from this week's town hall that we hosted live on Zoom. You can join our next public bi-weekly town hall by heading to hospitable.com forward slash town dash halls. You can always watch past event recordings too in the same place. That's hospitable.com forward slash town dash halls. Enjoy today's episode. Speaker 3: Okay, hello everyone and welcome to today's Town Hall. Thank you so much for joining us for our bi-weekly Town Hall. So we're about to do our brief disclaimer and I'm going to hand over to PC for some new team interest. Speaker 2: Hello everybody, fantastic to see you again. And as usual, we go to the ritual of sacrifice, actually introduction of the new team members that have been joining the company in the past few weeks. And so we're starting with Nicole, who is joining out of San Diego. Nicole, now is the perfect time to have your camera on and introduce yourself to a few hundreds of our customers. You're not shy, it's literally said in your title. So tell us a bit more about you. Speaker 7: Hi, everyone. I'm Nicole. I live in San Diego. I'm originally from Jamaica, as can see by the flag here. I grew up in DC in New York. I'm the newest member of the sales team. ⁓ I'll be supporting the accounts executive team by creating new sales opportunities through some out-run outreach. Speaker 2: Yeah, so if Nicole is calling you, ⁓ there's maybe a problem. But pick up, because she may have some goodies for you on your subscription, on your plan. It's always great thing. What's something fun about you? Maybe your relationship with this industry? Speaker 7: Yeah, so I've been a host for about seven years. ⁓ That's fun, but for fun, I like to restore BW buses. Speaker 6: you Speaker 2: That's very interesting. That opens an entire row of questions that I will ask later. Thank you very much, Nicole. Best of luck for your new role. And I think a few days before after, you have also joined ⁓ Brittany, who has been joining our customer success team. Hello, Brittany. How are you doing? Fantastic. So what is going to be your job at Aspitable? Speaker 7: Good, how about you? Yes, so I will be the newest customer success manager here at hospitable. I have actually been in the short term rental industry for about five years now, helping, well, self managing my own properties as well as helping hosts build their own portfolio. So super excited to bring my knowledge and skill set to the table and help hosts either will save time on their business, increase their sales and then scale if they want to. Yeah. So excited to here. Speaker 2: We're sorry that picture doesn't show. The presentation. It is there. see it. Beautiful picture. But it doesn't render. It's basically, it's kind of like having a problem behind the scenes. So thank you, Canva. We're canceling. Yeah. So and you do have a podcast. It's funny. The fun fact is basically, I recorded a podcast with you a few weeks before you joined us, Pitbull. Speaker 7: I know, come on guys! Speaker 2: And yeah, so you had just applied for a spitball before. So it's just basically a bit of a word for the people that are applying for a position at a spitball that may have already been declined. That's fine. Our sales organization is always recruiting for new roles. Just keep trying. It's fine. think for in the case of Britain, you the stars have aligned. And I customer success is a perfect position for you with all the effort that you want to put into educating the community. And here you go. It's like I have a job to basically I'm sure I talk long enough for all the fixes to come up. It's a good thing. thank you very much. Thank you. Best of luck. And you will be in the chat to be helping some current customers. OK, now the theme of this tunnel is a very different theme that basically is not the thing that we talk about ever. But that is asset protection. This presentation is going to go through Derek and the new thing he has been building for the past few months. Speaker 7: I'm gonna be here. Speaker 2: And then later, we're going to come back on hospitable product updates. But this one is a very meaningful one, and everyone ⁓ should be giving it a listen, because it impacts every single operator in the industry. Derek, good luck. Speaker 1: Thanks, Pierre. Hello, everybody. I am coming to you from not so sunny Chicago. We're actually doing one of our live workshops with about 25 customers down in a meeting room. So I've stepped up. So thanks for joining today. ⁓ We've been having a lot of conversations with our customers recently. I've been hearing this a lot of stories that have started to create a theme. When you hear something once or twice, you don't remember it. But when you start to hear things consistently, you start to pay attention. And I've started to hear some really unfortunate, but also maybe some fortunate things that are themes within our customer base. So Petro, next slide. This is an example of a customer who had a party thrown in their house. So they have a townhome and a townhome community, they're a property manager actually managing this property for someone else, which is also another pit in your stomach when you have to communicate to your owner that a party was thrown. then they start questioning you. There was a hundred person band party that showed up. The police intervened, just a total absolute mess. Okay. Now we'll click and show here. The end result here was actually quite a financial burden. There was a hundred thousand dollars, not only of damages, but also the reservations that they needed to cancel as a result. And we know with a lot of the booking platforms now, the cancellation terms, if you have to cancel on a guest, you can be penalized, not only for having to cancel, but then just the loss of the revenue information. So a single party can cause $100,000 in damage. The next example that we've heard is this Breckenridge ski in and ski out house. Beautiful home, right ski on, ski out. But the thing about this type of property, is 70 % of its revenue is generated in the three months of the heavy ski season. If you miss this season or don't optimize your bookings, it's really hard to recover. In this example, there was a pipe that burst. So there was a $250,000 claim, so much bigger claim, but actually the bigger part of the claim was the loss of income. They needed to bring this property down. for multiple months. When you're in these like, you know, ski in, ski out communities like this or an A-frame cabin in the mountains, sometimes you can't get things repaired as quickly. So $50,000 in property damage, you can fix it, but the loss of income was actually the biggest issue impacting this host. Next slide. And the next example here, so Airbnb states about 40 % of all reservations guests are traveling with pets. And usually that's not a problem. However, in this example, a host told us the pet got off the leash, walking around the neighborhood and the pet bit the neighbor. Okay. I've actually personally had this happen to one of my listings, not biting the neighbor, but I had a ⁓ pet get off the leash or go through the fence and run into the road. Luckily nothing happened, but it was like a very scary moment. This is actually even more severe. The total damages here were $50,000, only a $10,000 medical claim, but then the host had a liability claim against them for ⁓ the neighbor who knew that the owner was hosting this property. They filed a claim against the owner saying, hey, you let this guest stay, you're managing this as an Airbnb, and I can't be around dogs anymore, I have fear of dogs. ⁓ And that's a real thing that happens people when you have trauma happen. people will file a liability claim in addition to their medical claims. So in this case, it was a $50,000 total claim that is actually ongoing. So the question for you is what if one of these situations has happened? Maybe you've already had this happen to you before, but it'd be interesting for you to type into the chat. I mean, if this happened to you, have you had these situations happen where the claims arise, pipe burst, pet gets off the leash? We call these casualty claims, which is damage to your property and liability claims, which are claims against you for management or errors and omissions. ⁓ Now the question that I think you want to check is, are you protected is the way you would know this is by looking at your owner's insurance. That is the policy that you hold on the actual property that protects the dwelling and potentially the liability that comes with renting a short-term rental. Let's go to next slide. So that's me. Okay. I've been hosting for 11 years and I have 12 listings that I own and I co-host three listings just north of Atlanta in Roswell, Georgia. And I've been paying premiums on these properties over a quarter million dollars for 11 years. I first met. Now I'm going to call my insurance company City Garden. Okay. It's very similar to a national brand that you would know. but to keep it obscure, I've been partnering with City Garden for 11 years. I got a referral from my real estate agent from the first property. I don't know what I'm doing when you have your first property, you get your first rental, you're happy. ⁓ I just asked my real estate agent, hey, do know someone who sells insurance? She said, yeah, talk to my City Garden rep. Speaker 9: Thanks Speaker 1: And I say, look, I'm going to use this as a short term rental. I'm closing on Tuesday. Can you please get me covered? He sends the information. We go to the closing attorney and we're good to go. Now, over the course of the last 11 years, I've picked up 12 properties that I own all covered by City Garden. Okay. Now what happened is as I started hearing some of those stories that we just talked about with our customers, I started asking myself the question, what if that happened to me? Would I be covered? And it took like a week for my city garden rep to get back to me. I'm sort of like, that should be a pretty obvious answer. It should be able to answer yes or no pretty quickly. Took a week. I had the nudge. Hey, I'm checking back in. I'm checking back in because I was actually picking up a couple additional co-host properties. And that to me is a little bit more concerning because some times when you manage for other people, they don't keep the maintenance up on their property as much as you would as an Right. So I started like saying, Hey, I need an answer. Well, my city garden rep came back and said, actually, none of your properties cover short term rental. Your policies do not cover short term rental. So that's me. I was miss insured and I paid over a quarter million dollars in premiums and it's sitting here saying like, I'm glad something, nothing did happen, but what if something would have so that really connected the stories we heard with our customers. It's vulnerable for me to say, but wow, I've not had the correct coverage. Okay. I see Jeff says, sounds like they were not a good neighbor. LOL. Okay. ⁓ You guys get the idea here. Okay. So your short-term rental business should be compliant, scalable and sustainable, right? You're doing, whether you're a self-manager or you're managing a property management business, the revenue coming in and all the operations, you know, is part of the business, but we have to make sure that you're covered, compliant, scalable and sustainable. So with that today, Hospitable is announcing that we have created a sister company called Align. What is a line? Speaker 9: Okay, next slide. Speaker 1: Align's mission is asset protection for short-term rentals. Okay. Then you might have the question, what is asset protection? Because asset protection can be the actual dwelling, the property that you own, but also your business, your property management business. Okay. Align has been designed to provide owner's insurance on the actual dwelling itself. We will support you with entity setup. That is, do you have a management company set up today to protect you and separate your personal and professional liability? And also, if you don't own the properties, but you are a property manager managing someone else's property, we now have options for you for professional liability insurance as a property manager, even if you don't own the property for your management. business. So those are three products that Align offers. Next slide. Now, one of the big differences with Align is that we are an insurance broker. So I already saw in the chat, someone asked, do you offer proper, steadily, Wister? Okay, they're going to have all these questions. We offer over 50 different insurance carriers today as a broker. We are agnostic. We've partnered with many different insurance carriers to make sure that ⁓ that's what a broker is. We will have them compete for your business on price and coverage. And the point here is that today you probably like me. I had a feel good policy. Okay, I needed to buy the house. My city garden rep gave me a policy. I feel good. I'm covered. Now, luckily I didn't have a pipe burst or I didn't have a dog bite a neighbor. But the feel good policy usually only covers you if you live in the dwelling, if you look in the policy documents. What we want to make sure you as an owner have is not a feel good policy, but a feel great policy. We need to protect the actual dwelling itself. We need to make sure that it covers short-term rental. claims and what we call perils. are issues that are damages that might be caused to the property include their short term rental is just different. It's different than long term, right? When you have a long term tenant, right? It doesn't take them long. It takes them two or three days where they know where the light switches are. They know the height of the tub. They know the, that there's a little lip on the threshold when they walk between the kitchen and the living room. But when you have a short-term rental guest, they're looking, they've never been in this property before, right? And that's why there are homeowners policies that are specifically designed for if you live in the property, there are policies where if you rent to a long-term tenant, and then there are policies that are specifically written for short-term rental and the types of risk that short-term rental guests bring. A few of the examples here, liquor. Now, if you offer it, you have to offer it in a compliant way, but what if, if you leave beer, wine, if that's an upsell that you might offer. Well, we have short term rental coverage that that covers professional liability that might extend from that. What if you get bed bugs? Right. Loss of income. We covered the Breckenridge home. Right. So what a standard homeowners policy covers is if if if the if the tree fell through the roof or if there was a hail storm. But what happens if you have to cancel those reservations? Right. The slow water leak is the one that I actually had happen at my property. have an old, where I host is a historic ⁓ area, a historic property area. So I've kind of have built a niche restoring historic homes and then renting them out on short-term rental. Well, with that comes a lot of older homes have the old cast iron pipes, which are not the new PVC or PEX pipe. And so I had a pipe that burst in, ⁓ it had a slow leak. And I didn't have a guest in the home for like two weeks. Okay. And so when, the guests did arrive, they said there's a, there's, there's, there's a flood in the living room and that had gone down to the basement. had a sump pump, but it didn't work because I hadn't tested in a while. Okay. It's very vulnerable talking about these things. These things happen. Now, when I went to my city garden rep, the city garden rep told me that wasn't covered because it was a slow leak. can sit a state. had the standard dwelling policy. that was meant for long-term tenants. And the city garden rep said, look, that's considered a maintenance issue. The policy is written for you as you should have caught that. You know what? They were correct because if there was a long-term tenant in the property, they would have caught the small leak before it sat there and continued to flood all the way down into the basement. Short-term rental coverage would cover this situation though. The next option is off-premise liability. So short-term rental owners policies cover the examples in which, let's say you have a lake home or it really a lot of what you're doing as a host is you're hosting someone at the property, but you're selling the experience of living in that area, right? And you might say in your listing, hey, if you have the afternoon open, you might walk down to the waterfall or you might walk ⁓ over to the lookout view for the mountain or you might you know, catch the sidewalk and go up to the coffee shop. Now that's considered off-premise liability. And if, if let's say the guest does that, we have seen cases where, you know, guests are not quite sure where to go. They can trip and fall. And then they point back and say, well, gosh, this person sort of looks like part of the connected experience between booking the, the, the home and the things that they told me to do or that were available to do. Right. We all have welcome guides. We all have guidebooks, right? So there is off-premise liability that can be extended to you. These are all examples. You need the dwelling covered, but short-term rental coverage can protect you in these STR specific situations. Next slide. ⁓ So align again as a broker. We have partnered with many. I can already see some comments like, hey, this this particular carrier is really expensive. And that's exactly the point. We when I started quoting my own properties, when I talked to my city garden rep, it was so overwhelming because I would go to one company. They would want all this information about they want the addresses. They want to know how much I'm paying. They want to know all this information. And then when and then I want to go. get a quote from another company, I have to do it all over again. And then it ends up just being sort of paralyzing because you're just like, well, maybe I'll just stick with my city garden coverage. And that's what happens is we just get big because you have the feel good coverage. You just do nothing about it. So we have partnered with many dozens and dozens of carriers who cover short term rental specific dwellings. And some of these, like if you take like OB on this slide, like they cover like inland marine. where there could be hurricane ⁓ issues. Travelers is really good about covering sort of standard homes. Greenshield is really good for like mountain and A-frame cabins that are truly log cabin because some of the, like a steadily policy, they don't actually cover like actual log cabins if it's log frame versus like a cement frame. So not only do we have the carriers compete for your business based on coverage, but you submit one application to us and we'll go have them compete. for the business. We've secured discounts on your behalf. So we have ⁓ discounts like if you pay upfront annual, if you quote with us 30 days from your existing renewal, goes to show some of these carriers, ⁓ they think if you're trying to get coverage, like if your current policy expires in two days, they think that you're trying to get away from the other company, because maybe they're going to drop you. So we can get you discounts ⁓ if you quote in advance. And if you... have a management entity. So if you're managing the properties and you actually have an entity set up where you're managing as an entity and not Derek Jones is managing the property, but you have a Derek management LLC, can get you an additional discount and some of our carriers offer a discount if you do a home safety checklist. Next slide. Okay, now you might say, look, none of that's for me. I don't own my properties. I'm just a manager. I'm managing other people's properties. Okay, well we would still... love to quote your owner's policies. However, we do offer management insurance. have several options. Wistr is one of those options that's out there today. ⁓ Many of you probably have like something called a personal umbrella policy and they can cover you in many cases, but they often don't extend to commercial activity, especially if you're managing someone else's property. So in some cases you are, some cases you're not. So... If you don't own the property, still we want to make you look like a hero if you go to that owner and say hey Look, I think you have a city garden policy. I'll take a look at it. I just want to make sure you're protected in case something were to happen Send me over your policy and then we can help quote We also offer just the make the management liability policy for you. It's pretty inexpensive It's around $100 a year per property the carriers we have you have to have about five ⁓ listings for this. They have like a minimum $500 per year annual premium, but the more demand we get, we'll go back to them. So we have options if you own the property or if you're just a manager. Okay, the next thing is entity setup. So I mentioned a discount on entity. So protecting yourself, that's why we're calling this asset protection. It's not just owner's insurance. We want to make sure the, a lot of you became the accidental manager. We've talked about this before. think Emily on our team has coined that phrase. You sort of had your first, you lived in a property and then you moved and you made it a short term rental. Okay. And you maybe didn't get an entity set up. An entity could be a management entity. go to next slide. This is an example. It's of how I have my entity set up now I didn't have the correct entity set up when I first started I got my first second third property and then I'm like, whoa, I'm starting to accumulate Some wealth through property acquisition and then of course the property values go up and you're saying look You become a target if you have that much property, right? And if there's a claim they're gonna come after the person they see, you know potentially has the ability to pay a claim so I had to get I had to walk through the process of getting a management entity. I had to walk through the process of getting my properties titled correctly. ⁓ I then had my properties ⁓ report into a holding company in Wyoming because Wyoming has some very specific protections. And then for if you're US based, you can get what's called real estate professional status. And if you have the right entity set up right, we can list. not only you but your management entity as an additional insured onto the policy that we write. Having the right entity set up is also really important for tax time. know, what the beautiful part about real estate is real estate allows you if you have a full-time job, especially now that bonus depreciation has been extended for you, for the U.S. property owners. ⁓ It's beautiful because you can offset a lot of your W-2 income. But the challenge with this and having just gone through tax time, hopefully this maybe hopefully it doesn't resonate with you. But what happens, a lot of real estate investors, they have so many deductions that they have negative income on their tax return. And that's great because you reduce your tax liability. But then when you go to apply for the next mortgage, your mortgage officer says, listen, I know you make a lot of money and these are paper losses. but ⁓ you don't qualify, your debt to income ratio is too low and then you're sort of left scrambling. So the right entity structure is meant to set up to protect you against the claim, but also to make sure that tax time is exactly, yeah, I see some comments come, that's what a DSCR loan is for. Absolutely, DSCR loan should be, can be in LLCs, but your situation and where you live in your state may differ, but what we know is a lot of our... customers don't have just a standard management entity. So Align will help you get this set up. We'll review your current structure and make sure it's the right fit. And then we want to add those entities on as an additional insured. Okay, next slide. So I want to bring on a longtime friend of mine and one of our Align customers. His name is Dave Matthews. So Dave, if you'll come off mute and we'll have you share your video. Are you there Dave? Dave, you'll need to hit the unmute button on your Zoom panel. Dave. Speaker 9: Hey, how are you everyone? Speaker 1: I do well Dave and Dave we don't see your webcam maybe but we do hear you loud and clear. There we go. Hey Dave you're on the West Coast today correct. All right thank you so much so Dave why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourself and your rentals. Speaker 9: Yes, sir. So I'm David Matthews. I have four short-term rentals using hospitable. I live in Nashville, Tennessee, where I have two of my rentals. And I also have two rentals on our family farm in Turkey, North Carolina. Speaker 1: Excellent. All right. And you kind of became the accidental property manager. Tell us about that. Speaker 9: I did. So the two units in Nashville, we had a management company ⁓ that we were working with and they got bought out ⁓ with to another company and ⁓ they weren't doing a very good job ⁓ managing our properties. So I was like, let me try this out and see if I can do it. Speaker 1: Yep. And so Dave, when you were, I think you and your sister bought the properties in the short-term rental properties in Nashville. And when you contacted Align, we started getting your entities set up first and foremost before the properties went live. Tell us about that. Speaker 9: So yes, I call on like, what do I need to do to get this set up? And they helped me set up a management company and then my LLCs for each property and how to protect our, protect ourself in our other businesses. So it's not all lumped together. ⁓ So we were protected. Speaker 1: And then, so you bought the properties, you got the correct entity set up, you first hired a property manager, you then fired that property manager because they got acquired. Then you started managing the properties yourself. Then you started taking a little bit closer look at the operations and you took a look at your insurance policies, particularly the ones in Nashville, and you sort of found some interesting things. Speaker 9: Yeah, so we were paying about $6,000 per unit ⁓ for our properties. And ⁓ I was discussing it with you about this and you were like, wow, that's crazy. And he says, let me introduce you to Alain. And ⁓ as I was driving down Interstate 40, ⁓ I was on the phone with Alain and they got me hooked up and saved me. About $3,000 of property just like that. Speaker 1: So maybe the 20 % savings on the slide is understated. ⁓ We will say sometimes you save, sometimes it's more. Say with that, if we talk about your properties in Turkey, North Carolina, that's actually correct. If you're driving from Raleigh to Wilmington in Warsaw County, it's called Turkey, North Carolina. Dave is a turkey farmer himself. ⁓ Those properties, tell us about those and the insurance challenge that we ran into. Speaker 9: So on the main farm, we got ponds on the farm. We have livestock on the farm. There's a lot of stuff on a farm that people can get hurt with. And our insurance companies would not insure short-term rentals on the farm because of liabilities. Speaker 1: And so we secured you policies that saved you money in Nashville, but even that insurance company, they would not write the policy for the ones in Turkey, North Carolina, right? Speaker 9: And not until we divided the properties out and put it in separate names out of the farm's name. Speaker 1: So. Speaker 9: that you. Speaker 1: If now that you have everything protected, tell us about tax time. Now that you have all the entities set up and all the money's flowing correctly, how was tax time when that came around? Speaker 9: ⁓ I can say that we're saving a lot of money during tax time. Speaker 1: being a farmer, have lots of deductions anyways, as Davis told me too. he doesn't necessarily fully need the bonus depreciation, but being a farmer is hard, but also lots of deductions. ⁓ yeah, I guess. Speaker 9: So it is short-term rentals. Speaker 1: Yes, that's correct. Okay, well, cool. Well, Dave, any ⁓ advice to anyone who's kind of considering contacting a line or kind of taking a look at their insurance or entities? Speaker 9: I would definitely do it. It doesn't take no time at all and it might save you some money and a headache. Speaker 1: Dave, appreciate it. Thanks for, ⁓ we know you got the kids in the background too, so thanks for taking the time. Enjoy your vacation. Speaker 9: Thank you. Speaker 1: All right. Thanks, Dave. All right. So Dave's kind of the classic customer now. ⁓ We're happy to just quote your insurance too. But the combination, the reason we call it a line is we want everything to align. We want to get your entity structure set up, make sure you're collecting reservation revenues in the correct entity, and then make sure that you have the correct insurance on top of that and that we name everything, that everything's protected. OK. So. What does it cost? OK. Let's talk about that. First of all, before we talk about what it costs, which plan is it available on? Drum roll, click, click, click, click, click. It's on all plans. So if you're interested in getting a policy, is ⁓ a line, you can be on any plan, okay? We can also quote your long-term rentals as well if you have those. And so what does it actually cost you then if it's available on all plans? Go to the next slide. So there's no upcharge. We get paid by the carriers, by the insurance carriers. And it's, if you do the entity work, we have partnered with a couple of companies, depending on your situation, we don't mark that up. So we're essentially referring and making sure we connect you with the correct people. Okay, next slide. And if you already have short-term rental insurance, so let's say an example, like you already have proper or steadily, just let us know, we can switch your agency of record to a line. That way, when your annual renewal comes up, We can make sure that that's still the best policy. You can come to us one company We'll take a look at all of our other carriers and make sure that you've got the best rate best coverage next slide Okay, so with that we've launched a line it's available for us only today it's no additional cost to you and With that I'll turn it over to Pierre Speaker 2: Yes, and you can go to hsptv.com.line, Petra, if you want to share again the previous slide, because I think that's the one that so many people are checking into. So you can go to aligninsurer.com. That is a sign of Align website, which is this insurance broker plus entity setup guidance plus co-host and property management. Insurance, so everybody's protected and everything is airtight. And you see it pays for itself maybe several times over, depending on the cover that you're looking for, based on the story that you've heard from David. So it's a real case. And it's a real benefit to our customers. So Derek will be on the other side. ⁓ But do you have a tool available on the website of Align to be checking if your policy is covering short-term rentals? So that's specifically, are you having a feel-good policy where you pay money? but you will never be able to get a dollar back because your insurance will actually void any claim, deny any claim that you may send their way. Or you can start getting a quote for short-term rental-friendly policies. No commitment. If we offer a great competitive deal, that's great for you. But you can already submit your existing policy so that if you are If you want to, can switch to your agency of record, and we can look ahead of the renewal to make sure you're to have a great coverage, it's going to be efficient and saving you some money. And Tarek will be available as well for 15-minute calls to make sure that, just like in the case of Dave, where there was a short-term rental plus a farm, you can actually have a policy that's going to be ensuring all of the dimensions of your short-term rental business. So it is really a bespoke product that is specialist for the short-term industrial industry. Do not disregard it. Those examples, and I want to share it again, the pictures we don't, we didn't even bother thinking about generating them on AI. We just, can pick those stories really by the barrel, by the dozen really. ⁓ So we genuinely didn't even think about having that AI generated. So that is basically your call to action today. Costs you nothing, but it may save you money, and you may be receiving guidance that's to be very useful to you later. Now, what the hell is hospitable business in insurance? Well, here is the thing. We are a product company. We're a software company. We're a payment facilitator as well. And that means we are building some experience and knowledge across insurance products. So we are starting very tiny with security deposits. And we want to expand across damage rivers and damage protection insurance. That's what I've seen in the chat is really compelling. And you want to get in to ensure that your reservation, your property is protected. But there is a bit of an obscure, perverse reality to it. The insurances, especially when you deal with that, are in the sport of denying claims. They collect the money for sure, and they don't want to be paying you money. I think I can say that. Basically, you know that when you're playing that game, the job is basically you are all on the other side of the premium amount, and there is going to be some risk that you get denied. And the very first reason why vendors will deny the actual claim whenever it's a disastrous situation is that your owner's insurance is not actually protecting you from short-term adults. So that means everything needs to be, I'm have to make the joke, aligned. for you to be benefiting from those products. Otherwise, we're reselling bottled water without the plastic. Not be able to get effective coverage. So that's why we're building Align, a service company that's there to preview on bespoke product with all the networks, all the licensing. It's a licensed company for selling insurance products. So it's all a regular, it is a separate regulated entity. Speaker 8: You will not Speaker 2: that can help you on the entity setup, the owner insurance and the cost and property management insurance, both of those combined, so that we can be selling you damage waivers, damage protection insurance and packaging this in the coming months in a way that's going to be sustainable. And there is only Ospitebo that really is doing that at this point in time. And we believe, really, we will never find out why, because all of those claims are going to be on damage waivers and damage protection insurance are actually going to be met. It's going to be a very serious value add for every single one of you. So that is what a business is in insurance. Obviously, protection of your assets, protection of your income and your business is a very big deal for us. Now, I know you didn't wake up to be hearing about insurance. Nobody does. So delegate that to a line today so that you don't hear about it. But however Nikita is here to be talking about something that's really good for the dopamine, there's been plenty of very exciting development, and I'm very happy about everything. But yeah, Nick is going to be telling you more about MCP and the recent development because we have new tools, right? Speaker 3: Yes, we do. So thank you, Derek and PC, from one exciting thing to another. ⁓ Two weeks ago, we were the first property management software to launch an MCP. ⁓ And there has been a lot of excitement about this. So MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. And our MCP lets you interact directly with your properties, the reservations, messages from any AI agent, like ChatGPT, Cloud, OpenClaw, and so on. And with that, can build custom workflows, dashboards, reports. You can find gaps and opportunities. You can message guests and so on. And it's available to all customers, with the exception of Essentials. So that means legacy, host, pro, mobile, but not Essentials. And if you're interested, you can just go to mcp.hospitable.com to get instructions for how to get started. ⁓ What can it do? So as mentioned already, ⁓ know, stuff to do with your reservations, messages, and so on. But for like a fuller list, a fuller overview, you can get access, you can give your AI access to your property details, reading and updating the calendar, including calendar notes, ⁓ seeing what's in your Knowledge Hub, and editing your Knowledge Hub, which means that if the AI can find things that are missing, it can add them for you. ⁓ Managing reservations, inquiries, quotes, sending messages, reading messages. And newly, just in the past few days, ⁓ seeing, creating, and editing tasks that you assigned, for example, to your cleaners. It's also available in the MCP now. And as of today, also ⁓ giving AI access to the reviews that you've either sent in the past to guests, as well as those that are coming up pending. And then the AI can actually write reviews for you if you give it permission. ⁓ We're always adding new things all the time. And on the near term, very near term roadmap, so ⁓ adding things to do with devices, smart devices to the MCP, giving it access to your schedule messages as well, as well as being able to edit property details. I know a lot of you have been asking for that. Very exciting, we're always adding new things ⁓ and we love what you've been doing with it. So apart from... just giving you access to these tools. What we've also been doing is running a few workshops. We planned a series of three. We've already done two, another one scheduled for Mid-Nay. So the first one a few weeks ago, we talked about kind of AI agents in general and what MCP is and does with a few examples and a lot of Q &A. The last one we did yesterday where I ⁓ gave... ⁓ the audience some prompts and use cases that they can use immediately with AI, just to show how the MCP works in practice with a lot of different scenarios. And the next one ⁓ for ⁓ mid-May will be really about going a lot deeper and showing you how to build entire AI workflows and mini apps ⁓ using hospitable MCP and your AI agents of choice. You can review the ⁓ first workshop already on our YouTube channel. ⁓ And then the second one should be landing maybe ⁓ within the next few hours or day or so. Somebody will surely share the links to these in the chat as I speak. ⁓ But one thing I want to point out, something really, really cool happened during yesterday's MCP workshop, Petra. So this is really awesome. So one of the prompts that I shared was about gap nights. having AI detect gap nights, orphan nights, ⁓ And I showed an example of the actual prompt that you can copy paste into the AI agent. And I showed Claude AI an example of what happened there. One of our hosts, Jacob, was listening in. He connected hospitable MCP on the spot to his ChadGPT account, ran the prompt, it identified orphan dates for him, and then Jacob offered a discount to the relevant guests to extend. And two of them immediately extended, all before the workshop even finished. That's cool, right? ⁓ Okay, I just wanted to point that out. We all found that really, really cool. Okay, so apart from the workshops, something else that has been happening is an MCP buildathon or like hackathon. We challenged our community to ⁓ build something valuable and new with the hospitable MCP. We offered some prizes like hospitable credits and boy did you deliver. ⁓ So hospitable customers submitted almost 30 dashboards, workflows, guidebooks. and apps that they built using AI agents and hospitable MCP. And that's across categories, like reporting, guest re-engagement, cleaner accountabilities to do with reviews, and even some basically full-on AI ⁓ co-managers for their business. We were blown away by the spectrum of submissions here. We did have three prizes up for grabs. Honestly, it was hard to choose. But We wanted to announce the winners today to give you an idea of what's possible, what people have been building, and to inspire you as well. So in third place, ⁓ Joel, who had Claude AI, ⁓ used hospitable MCP to find the best rebooking possibilities by looking at previous guest conversations, the reviews that they left, filtering them based on Joel's criterias, ⁓ matching them with future calendar availability that matched the previous guest stays. And that's all like within a single ⁓ AI conversation with Claude. It's not like complex apps put together, just literally one AI agent chat. And after Claude AI found the relevant guests based on all that filtering, Claude also drafted personalized messages for every single one of those, ⁓ referencing any special moments that they had during the previous days, like the honeymoon or the cool one that was mentioned, it like a bear near the cabin. And all of those things came up because the AI saw that in the conversation history and reviews that were surfaced by hospitable MCP to the AI. So that's number three. Second place, Christopher, who built a damage claim recovery helper using AI and hospitable MCP. So related to Derek's topic of asset protection, though I assure you purely coincidental, this was not planned. So Christopher's app. aggregates portfolio losses. So prioritizes claims by urgency in dollars and generates reopened workflows to reclaim his margin. So what we really liked about this is that it tackles an issue that is on the one hand, certainly not sexy. It's not exciting, but it's also easy to sometimes let slip because, you know, any given claim in isolation can maybe not seem like much, you know, a hundred to a hundred dollars here and there. But if you see the whole thing in front of you, like in one dashboard over time, you can really see the impact on your margin. And what Christopher built, again, using AI plus the Submittable MCP is a way to get all of that info in one place and be able to do cross provider ⁓ policy matching and suggestions for his VA to basically go in and actually action these things, as well as have evidence logs and so on. So super useful for the bottom line. Okay. And in first place, Gus Dominguez. And this ⁓ blew the entire team away. We were hoping for someone to really take this challenge and run with it. And boy, did Gus deliver. So what Gus did was build an entire command center powered by five different AI agents. And he styled it in the theme of Game of Thrones slash World of Warcraft, ⁓ a game, if you're not aware. So what this does is it pulls live hospitable data to monitor cashflow, pricing signals, ⁓ booking pace and forecasts, ⁓ property health. and it delivers actionable insights every single day from pretty much the entire ⁓ gamut of all the data available through hospitable MCP. And it creates it all in this visually incredible ⁓ interface. And it's always being updated in real time. This was by far the most creative ⁓ thing that somebody created with hospitable MCP. So Gus. Congrats on the first place and congrats to the other winners, ⁓ Christopher and Joel as well. ⁓ Like I said, we had a lot of really amazing submissions. ⁓ It was hard to choose, but we wanted to give you kind of a taste from a bunch of different angles here. ⁓ But that's not all. So what we have planned is a way for you to also get inspired by the things that have been built. ⁓ during this build-a-thon, as well as whatever's gonna be happening in the days and weeks to come. So what we're working on and what's coming soon is an MCP library. Basically, we wanna have something for you to ⁓ go to, to see ⁓ examples and prompts that you can reuse immediately to build these sorts of things yourself in your AI agents of choice. Some will be a lot more complex, it will require a bit more effort here, and some will be kind of copy paste and go ahead and do it straight away kind of things. For example, the rebooking stuff, that's one of those things that you can just do immediately, as well as the Gap Knights thing as well. ⁓ And ⁓ just today, think Petra launched a new MCP group in the community, which please go to community.hospitable.com, join in there. ⁓ Folks will start sharing ⁓ the ⁓ things that they've built. ⁓ And I think a lot of you will be asking questions for how to build those things. So please. Everyone join in, you can share advice there, get advice there. We'll be joining in as well to share our feedback and our guidance. Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you. That's what I wanted you to say. The programming language is English. Everybody can do custom software that works for you. doesn't have to be working the same way for your neighbor. And that's really the age we're living in where everyone can build the software exactly the way that they want, including if you want ARIA to basically be telling you how to negotiate the next discount, which is amazing. So Gus, you made a week at Osprey table. Congrats to you. Speaker 3: ⁓ Okay, thank you, BC, and that's it from me on MCP. ⁓ Very exciting. We're really happy with how things are going, and yeah, stay tuned for even more in the community as well as updates from us for more tools coming to MCP soon. And with that, I'm gonna pass it over to Andrew. Speaker 2: Thank you, Nick. What a hard act to follow. ⁓ So jealous. All that MCP stuff. So fun. ⁓ Operations. In the previous town hall, we shared that you now have the ability to pay your teammates who are using the Hospital Tasks app from multiple bank accounts. So if your business is set up where each property that you manage has its own bank account, you can now set up your task and task rules to pay for the right account. So today we are building on that with something new. Payment schedules up until now. Your only option was to pay per task. For many of you, that didn't match how you already pay your cleaners, and it made it hard to switch to hospitable. As of today, you can set up a payment schedule for each of your teammates. Now we heard from many hosts that each of your cleaners have a different expectation on when they get paid. If you manage multiple properties, it can get complex fast. Different cleaners, different properties, they often overlap, different bank accounts, different schedules. But once you set this up in hospitable, you don't have to think about it again now. We'll handle it for you. And we'll give you full visibility in the new payments tab in the task section where you can see upcoming payments for each teammate. We're launching this just as the free payments period ends in April for this new kind of pay your own team functionality that we launched. So it's just in time. After that, payments will include a small fee. and payment schedules help you minimize those fees that we charge. So to review the fees that come with Pay Your Own Team, host, pro and mogul customers, you get one free payment per active property per month. So many of you won't pay any fees if you choose to pay your teammates monthly. On any additional payments, we charge 1.5%, capped at only $5. If you are on our new Essentials plan, Every payment is charged. It's 2.5 % but still capped at only $5. And that's all I have. And with that, I will pass to Marina for some connectivity updates. Speaker 7: Thank you, Andrew. Hello, everyone. So quick update on one of the most awaited releases for the connectivity team this year, Verbal. So we launched a wait list for hosts who want early access to Verbal through hospitable, the new integration that we've been building. We have 1,400 hosts who already submitted their interests to join. We're seeing this excitement because listing on Verbal can lead to longer, higher value stays. For example, one host and the pilot had a 17 day stay worth $25,000. That's 10 % of their annual revenue in a single preservation. That's insane. Right now, the waitlist is the fastest way to get access. We already started inviting hosts, about 40 so far, and we're rolling this out gradually to make sure everything works well. When you join the wait list, you can share your preferences, for example, if you want us to be your Metronome record, or if you want to wait for Stripe, and a few details about your setup. All of that helps us invite you at the right time when the experience will be the best fit for you. We're to open the new integration to everyone in June. So if you're interested in joining a little bit earlier, just scan the QR code on the screen to join the wait list. It takes a minute to fill the survey in there. and it's the best way to get early access. Now I'm inviting Avi to stage to bring you updates on direct. Thank you, Marina. ⁓ Just one quick improvement to talk about for direct. ⁓ And it's one that has been long overdue. So soon guests will be able to see their full payment history in the guest portal for their direct reservations. And they will also be able to download PDF receipts, which will be branded with your logo. So if you have any guests who need a receipt for expense or reimbursement purposes, they'll be able to access that on their own through the guest portal. And that's it for direct. Next up is Tim giving some more polish updates. Speaker 2: Yes, Abby. Yes, so taking a quick look at some of the things we've been polishing over the last couple of weeks. I'm going to power through this in the interest of time. But first, some search improvements. So you can now target or scope your search to focus only on specific areas within Possible. So for example, searching only within properties. We've also added more areas of the app. to the search results. So you can now search for specific integrations or specific pages within your direct site. And then finally, we also fix the small issue where some help articles and community posts were missing from the results. They no longer are. Last then on the next slide. So previously, We blocked the ability to offer early check-ins or late checkout upsells on same-day turnovers. This is no longer the case. You are now able to offer those upsells when you have back-to-back bookings. We've added a new setting to those upsells so you can control if you want to allow this, and if so, how many additional hours the guest can purchase. But we've also automatically we will automatically hide the upsell offer on the other reservation if one is purchased. So if the late checkout upsell is purchased on the first reservation, we will automatically hide the early check-in offer on the second reservation to make sure that you do not end up double-booked. That's all from me. Over to Emily for mogul updates. Speaker 7: Thank you, Tim. All righty. After many painful office hours, calls watching you all navigate through mogul features, we knew that something had to improve with the experience. Features used to live kind of outside of the context where they made the most sense, outside the context of the business, making it really difficult for you all to navigate where you needed to get to go. So owner management features have moved. Everything that you used to do under owner management, like adding owners, reviewing statements, It now lives under your business, operations, your business. It's the same exact tools. Nothing has changed functionally. It's just easier to find what you need and to navigate around. So if you'd like to explore this, you can head to operations, your business, and you will find everything that you need there. We're also doing a better job of surfacing any extra setup needed on the business in order for you to be able to take full advantage of the owner portal or owner payouts and payments. So if you see anything in the setup, column here on your business, you'll know exactly what you need to do to take action on so that you can take advantage of payouts and payments in the following month. Friday is May 1st, so you'll be able to publish April statements then, and you'll do that by going to operations, your business, instead of operations owner management. You'll see what I'm talking about when you go there to navigate around. All right, off to miles to cover events. Speaker 3: Thank you very much, Emily. Okay, so just a few events to quickly call out. So tomorrow we have a support workshop with our director of support, Nurhan. So kind of guiding you through the updates and improvements we've been making and also how to get the most out of support and also in particular the Smarty chatbot. So great session there. If you're always wondering how do I get the best support from Hospitable, go ahead, scan that QR code to register. We'll see you tomorrow for that workshop. Next up, we already had a call out for the MCP workshop, but here it is again, in case you didn't manage to get that link, I highly recommend checking out that workshop on May 19th. So that's the bottom QR code there. If you want to scan that to register for that session, the QR code at the top is to watch the past ones on replay. Thank you, Nick, for sharing that in the chat as well. And then finally, as always, we will be back in two weeks' time with another Town Hall. So if you want to add those to your calendar, you can go ahead and scan that QR code to make sure you never miss another town hall again. Okay, I'm gonna now hand over to PC to talk a little bit about the host token. Speaker 2: Yes, I completely forgot about that segment. looking at the time. Hello, yes, me again. If you didn't know, Hospitable is funded by very needy investors. And those are all of our customers combined. We have raised 2.2 million ⁓ in this way, and we would not change it. We would not go to private equity or venture capital to do that. We want to be independent and sovereign of our own future. So many of you have been joining. So this is basically the ticker updates. It's now at $37.19. And for everyone that's contemplating investing, the clock is ticking because on May 1st, that is this Friday, the valuation will be having its last scheduled increase to an increased valuation at $270 million, which we believe is still very competitive. to represent the value of Osprey table today if we're actually going into actual markets. So yeah, today you can still invest at $234 million. That represents a 24%, 25 % discount over what we consider the fair market value, the market value of Osprey table if we're going into actual markets. So that's your opportunity. You can make money of your property manual software in so many ways, hopefully, with the product. But also, in the case of an exit, you will be able to collect the proceeds. of that sale. So you can join, you need to be accredited if you are a US-based investor and the best trick I've ever found to find a letter to or sustain your accreditation status is to go to accredited.am, that's accredited.am, they charge a small fee but the most competitive I've found for you to verify your assets and make sure you can join the offering. that's restricted in the US to accredited investors, but everyone outside of the US can invest without just a KYC check and some money laundering tests, as is common for those kinds of programs. So that's it for the host token. We are at time. Miles, we're going to take one question. And I know he's been raising his hand for quite some time. We're to take one question from Joseph. Speaker 8: So Speaker 2: if he's still here with us, ⁓ live at least, but he seems to be already taking control. Joseph, how can we help you today? Hey there. ⁓ Speaker 5: Yeah, I just had one, by the way, I love all the updates, you know, just wanna call it Thank you! Speaker 2: Thank that means a lot to us! Speaker 5: MCP love it all. So thank you for that. Looking forward to some of those ⁓ options to you know, from what the submissions came through and be able to utilize them myself. You know, the insurance product, I love that, you know, just proper just crazy, crazy expensive. you know, there's that. ⁓ So definitely looking forward to being able to shop around. The only one one small call out that I wanted to point out was an issue I noticed over time was ⁓ security deposits. You guys have a two day time limit, know, ideally 48 hours, but I noticed there are instances, and I've escalated this with the WhatsApp support. There are instances where I was not able to make the claim after a 36 hour window. So I went to go after 36 hours, I went to go to try to make the claim, but I wasn't able to do so. So I just wanted to kind of call that out here in a call. that it would be good maybe if it was extended, you know, at least to the two day, the 48 hour window marking. In my case, one of my situations was I had a late checkout like two hours later, usually it's 11 a.m., it was 1 p.m. So ideally it should be after the 48 hour that mark, but either way it was still ended up being 36 hours, because it like cut off at like 12 a.m. that morning. Which is the takeout. Speaker 2: which is depending on the checkout time. I believe that basically is, so yeah, I think we counting from the checkout time. And so we can investigate, have you escalated that to support already? Speaker 5: Yeah, but the issue is like when it's not hitting that 48 hour window mark and then I have to like go back and message your support, I already lost maybe at least like on the $200 and you know, being able to use those security deposits. And then I had to message WhatsApp support and then, you know, I had to like provide proof to you guys. then, whereas in the security deposit, I just had to write a message and be able to make the claim there. It's a lot easier versus going through the support. So it would be better at least if you could just make sure fully, you know, do some testing around, making sure that. It hits that 48 hour window mark. ⁓ Speaker 2: Okay, just Abby, Abby's here. She's the product manager that runs this team in particular. you want to respond. Speaker 7: I was just gonna say noted, think we might have some issues with time zone and that might be causing the window to close. Speaker 2: Again, zones, that basically is a recurring theme. If you are an engineer or someone that's touching code and basically you speak English and now you can, that's really time zone is the biggest problem at the speed table every day. Sorry, Joseph, next thing you wanted to say? Speaker 5: I'm a developer too, so UTC everything, UTC is important. ⁓ Speaker 2: No, we can't do that. We can't do that. wish. Speaker 5: ⁓ The other point was maybe you can even possibly extend it to three days. I know it's like I know it's a balance between the guests, ⁓ know, wanting their money back versus the host. know, from the host side, will be Speaker 8: Sorry, next one. Speaker 2: not going to lie. I don't want to be spending the next 10 years of my life working around security deposits. That's kind of the theme of this panel is basically there needs to be more diversified offering. The problem is that security deposit are always going to be something that's basically a payment processing act. We need to have boundaries to basically ensure that we're still operating on our own authorization scheme, not a capture scheme. We can look into obviously making sure that what we say we do is absolutely there. But I believe you're going to find a ton of value with damage rivers or damage protection insurance. That's Tim, our product manager, is basically also working on on the side. that basically we would love to have an answer on those points later because I believe it's going to be far more compelling for your guests and for yourself as a business operator. Speaker 5: Percent. Yeah, because I would love to use you guys because right now I've been using Truvy and like half the claims I put with them kind of get denied like stains and you simple stuff that you know, would be nice. Yep, exactly. So Truvy hasn't been they've been okay, but not great. What was the point I was gonna make? Okay, last thing about security deposits is the messaging. ⁓ Just there are times where I have same day check-ins and the messaging around ⁓ the security deposits may Like sometimes the message, I don't know if I have the option to configure that. I haven't looked into it, but ⁓ yeah, sometimes the messages don't go out for quite a while if it's like a same day booking, for example. So the messages get blocked to the guest, but they don't even know that they have to make a security deposit. Speaker 2: That's a fair call, yeah. Speaker 5: Okay, yeah, that's that's that's pretty much it from my side. But besides those are very many school be beyond the huge things y'all are doing. So thank you for for all that y'all do really do appreciate it. Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you so very much Josef for the kind words. I need to bring it to an end. We need to learn how to end those tunnels. Speaker 9: You Speaker 2: There's an exciting development that you've heard. Hospitable is creating a sister company called Align that's an insurance broker, entity setup advisor, also property management insurance. It's too complicated, too many products. That's really the hospitable ADHD, again, on Overdrive. Think of it like if you have an asset, you probably do if you're on that score. You actually are very likely an investor, or you're running on behalf of an investor. You will need to protect that asset. Again, the videos, the features that you've seen in the beginning are not AI-generated. And in any case, you know you are exposing to this kind of risk. We're here to generate more revenue. That part is great. We also need to make sure that as customer of ours, your assets are also going to be protected. And whenever something really terrible happens, you are going to be supported during this transition. You have heard about many other exciting developments, so variable.sptable.com. That is the link for anyone that is fed up about Chrome extension. That is for everyone that is excited about using our merchant love record infrastructure and having tax compliance done for you, with you, for variable payments. So you go to variable.sptable.com, you go through a survey, we are going to be asking you some questions. Speaker 3: We get it. Speaker 2: That is going to be the channel that we are going to use to roll out the integration progressively while we still in the pilot, building a ton of confidence and in terms of payment being processed. ⁓ I think that is really what I would like you to get out of this tunnel. Thank you so very much. ⁓ See you in two weeks. Now, I need to call out something for the people that have been staying so late. ⁓ Speaker 3: volume Speaker 2: We actually are going to be traveling next week. The entire OSPutable team will be meeting in Montenegro for a once in two years now ⁓ company retreat. So we're going to be having plenty of fun. That's probably the best time to be following our social media channels on Instagram. I don't think you can have a lot of pictures of employees by the pool. I think there are probably laws against that. Miles, what do you think? Probably not. Probably not. But yeah, we're going to be strategizing, thinking the job is really, you've done a ton of work, ton of development. That's one opportunity to not retreat, but attack again on this particular industry and see what we're going to be doing for the next 10 years. It's quite an ambitious agenda. Thank you so very much, and see you in two weeks, probably time a bit more. I don't know. I'm white as fuck. Ciao.