Latest / Hospitable Hosts / Automating Key Management for Short-Term Rentals with KeyNest
Transcript
- Ethan Brown: Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Hospitable Hosts podcast. My name is Ethan Brown. I am the General Manager of Asia Pacific here at Hospitable. And today I have the absolute honor of being joined by Piers Haddie. He is the Australia and New Zealand Area Manager for Keynest. And we're gonna talk all things Keynest, which I'm really excited to get into. So welcome Piers, how are you today? Pierce Hattie: Good thanks, Ethan. Good to be here. Ethan Brown: So you started in commercial real estate. I'm curious, ⁓ our listeners can get an opportunity to get to know you a little bit better. What drew you into the short-term rental space and keyness specifically? Pierce Hattie: So I actually found Keynest on LinkedIn. I was sort of looking to make a move into the, into a property tech company. And I just found out about Keynest and thought it was such a great idea and had a meeting with the co-founder Florian. And then, yeah, just four years later, I've been enjoying growing with the company. Ethan Brown: Awesome. so was your role, were you like straight up the area manager for Australia, New Zealand, as soon as you kind of joined the company or has that grown over time too? Pierce Hattie: Yeah, so they were looking for a new sort of manager to basically handle the operations in all of Australia. yeah, that was an open role and I was fortunate enough to get the gig. Ethan Brown: That's awesome. That's kind of a similar story to myself in a way, other than I was actually a hospitable customer before joining the team as my way into the hospitable ⁓ Asia Pacific general manager role. ⁓ And also about four years ago. we're kind of on a similar timeline. It's interesting. I, a lot of companies within this industry, in this area really, I think need someone that's in the area that's supporting local customers. So it's, it's great that Keynest have got you in that role and ⁓ supporting all your customers in the region. For listeners who haven't heard of Keynest, can you give us the elevator pitch? How does Keynest work? Pierce Hattie: Yeah, definitely. So we have a network of what we call keyness points, are locations. So normally stores that are open, you know, 24 seven that you can store your keys securely with and basically manage access to all of your properties through collection codes or drop off codes. So if you've got a property in Sydney, but you live in Gold Coast, you're able to just drop off your keys at that point and then send your guests the collection code or drop off code or your cleaner. and they can access the property basically remotely. Ethan Brown: Awesome. And are your customers, like a Keynest customer, are you open to servicing all levels of customers or like have you got a specific niche in terms of the customer using Keynest? Pierce Hattie: Yeah, no, we basically have a very broad scope of customers. So we have people, you know, that do dog walking that will want to pick up keys to go and get the dogs all the way up to large companies like made comfy who manage, you know, over a thousand properties that that scale through key nest and have that ability to just set up keys all over across Australia. Ethan Brown: Awesome, that's great. And obviously we're here in Australia, but I believe Keenest, not just supporting Australian customers, what are some other regions around the world that you guys are operating in? Pierce Hattie: So the head office is in London. So the UK is definitely the main market, closely followed by France. We've got an office there in Paris, and then of course Spain, the United States, and a few other countries. But yeah, those would be the ones for sure. Ethan Brown: Awesome. And so can you tell me how Keynes differs from like your traditional lockbox? A lot of our customers will be familiar with both the manual lockbox and then also what we call like a smart lock or a smart device in the traditional sense. What problems does Keynes solve that those solutions don't? Pierce Hattie: So would say primarily for apartment buildings, oftentimes the body corporate or the building managers are quite anti-lock boxes, putting them outside the building on a railing, generally gets a lot of complaints from residents. So we provide a solution where you can secure your keys somewhere closely off site, but then also you're not affecting the other residents of the building. It's also... Yeah, there's going to be buildings where there's just nowhere to put a lockbox. So there's a lot of our customers actually don't have much of a choice other than to use keyness, especially somewhere like Melbourne, where you don't have, you I mean, you've got council cutting off lockboxes. And then there's an issue with actually getting into the apartment building if you have a smart, smart lock on your door, because you still need access to the actual building itself. So keyness really crosses that problem. for a lot of people. Ethan Brown: Yeah, that's awesome. That's something that I hear really frequently is ⁓ with body corporates or they might be called homeowners associations, not actually allowing hardware changes on doors. Like if you're like me and you're a self manager and you own the home, obviously you can make the choice, whatever fits your door, you can change the smart lock and you can kind of. ⁓ make those changes as you see fit, but sometimes, like whether you're talking apartment building or even smaller complexes of just a few apartments, they have quite strict restrictions on how what you're allowed to use is your locks. I think that's one thing that I've seen that Kinesis is really solving with your product. Pierce Hattie: Yeah, absolutely. And even with, even if you do have a lock box that's working or a smart lock, if you're in a, you know, a freestanding house, um, we've noticed an increase in spare keys. So people would just want to have a spare key that's at a 24 seven location in case something happens with their, their main set. So it's another, uh, segment that we're, that we're growing. Ethan Brown: Yeah, for sure. That's an interesting one. I've had that myself personally. I started out when we first had our short-term rentals ⁓ with only manual keys and we used to hide them under a rock. We actually first would go and greet people in person and physically give them the keys and then either collect them off them if we could or have a cleaner collect them or we would ⁓ ask them to hide them under a... Pierce Hattie: you Ethan Brown: rock or a pot in the front yard, is definitely not the most secure scenario. we've had, that was why we initially, for our properties, transitioned to smart locks on a couple of our properties because we... ⁓ had instances where the access of the property ⁓ was known to guests that were obviously checked out and a month later if they know, Ethan keeps his keys under the pot by the front door and then you've got a new guest, like that presents a real security issue. I think it's a really good benefit of having a solution like yours too where it's a lot more secure and restrictive and if the keys aren't where the keys are supposed to be, you're gonna know about it pretty quickly. Pierce Hattie: Absolutely. Ethan Brown: So you're leading TNS expansion across Australia and New Zealand. What's the appetite been like from hosts and property managers in this region specifically? Pierce Hattie: Yeah, it's really strong. mean, it's grown from six stores that we've had in 2022 all the way to over 260 now in three and a half years. So there's a really strong demand for local customers and we constantly have new store requests coming through every week. So there's just the backlog of new locations that we need to set up constantly because there's just new areas all the time that people want to set up keenest locations. So yeah, I'd say Definitely one of the strongest ⁓ markets in the world. And as a matter of fact, we actually have some of the highest usage per store out of all of the countries. So yeah, there's some really hot pockets for key nest in Australia. Ethan Brown: Awesome, awesome. I'm a little bit, and this is just like my own personal curiosity, how does it work? Say you've got a company with a, I don't know, what's a really good example? Like what's the kind of store that you'd find a keyness box in? Pierce Hattie: I'd say AZMAT at the moment would be our biggest partner. Ethan Brown: Come on, so if you had a property like that, ⁓ how do you, do you find that they'll be reaching out to you to say, hey, we want this key nest in our location? Is that usually how it's working or are you guys actually going the other way around? Pierce Hattie: Yeah, it's a bit of both. So we've got the head office partnership with EaseMart. So if they've brought on a new store, they'll actually let the new franchisee know that they can partner with Keynest and they'll get in touch with us. But in many cases, we'll get a customer request and then approach them directly about setting up Keynest. that whole process really only takes two to three weeks. Ethan Brown: Yeah, awesome, awesome. We won't dive into like the physical actual lock boxes yet, but I'm sure we could probably have a whole other podcast about them too. But I've got more questions and I'm sure our listeners do too. But before we get into that, I really want to talk about the big news, which is the new keyness integration with hospitable. Can you give me a high level view of how that works in practice for a host? Pierce Hattie: Sure. Yeah, definitely. So I suppose the whole purpose is just to save hosts a lot of time with this new integration. originally they would have to basically log into Keynest and create a single use code for each guest booking that they have, which, you know, once you've got a few properties, that's actually quite a task to undertake. So what this new integration does is it just automates that whole process through all of their OTAs that they're using so that when a guest books, their state that they'll get that code sent automatically for their keys to collect from the keyness point. Ethan Brown: Awesome, so it's definitely super secure, not the scenario that I was talking about for myself personally earlier, that's cool. So what was the motivation behind building this integration? What were hosts and property managers asking for? Pierce Hattie: haha Well, I saw on your website earlier, you've got simple at one door, simple at 100. So I think just having that scalability and having it all under one roof so that, you know, the hosts can actually just automate the process. And, know, the more properties you have, the more it makes sense. So just, just that ability to not have to log in and create a new collection code for every guest that you have. It's a game changer. Ethan Brown: Yeah, definitely. I think it ties in really well with what hospitable and key nests are both trying to do. Like you spoke about spending less time doing manual things, like spend less time doing, I don't know, key, like handling everything related to keys and key management. There's more time you can put back into your business too. So I think that's one of the huge pluses out of this integration as well. Can you walk us through the guest experience from the time of making the booking to when they actually pick up their key? Pierce Hattie: Yeah, sure. So they would essentially make their booking and then normally 48 hours before that we'll get their check-in instructions with the Keynet's collection code or the Magic Link. The Magic Link is just basically a live status update of the keys. So on the day of check-in, they can check that link and see that the keys are ready to be collected and just go to the store with the given address and give them the eight digit code and they're ready to check in. Ethan Brown: Awesome. And probably a great time to talk about the physical lockbox. I've seen them personally at conferences and some of our users may have seen them at different conferences around the world. But ⁓ can you give me like just for the listeners that don't have the visual prompt what the lockboxes actually look like? Pierce Hattie: Yeah, so it's, if you can imagine sort of like a parcel locker, but on a bit of a smaller scale, just made specifically for keys can be installed on the wall. And you've just got a little screen on the bottom left where you can punch in your code, the slot will open and you can get your keys and then same thing, dropping off the keys, putting your drop off code or scan the fob and the slot will open and you're done. We also have a more manual system because not every store can. have the space for a locker. So that can be like an over the counter system with an app where the keys are stored in the key cabinet as well. So there's two different sort of options that you might find in a different store. Ethan Brown: Okay. Awesome. I did not know that. That's interesting. I'm learning today as well. It's one of my favorite things about out of doing these podcasts and done a few over the years now as I find we're walking through like my generosity, my curiosity means that we surface things that I wasn't aware of, even though working with customers day to day about putting these solutions into place. that's awesome. I'm curious. Pierce Hattie: haha Ethan Brown: How does the automation through hospitable and keynest actually reduce the operational load? we're talking about managing manual keys and that kind of thing. For a host managing multiple properties, like we're talking about a hundred plus, how does that help reduce that operational load? Pierce Hattie: think with the systems before Keynest, you're using a lockbox, you've probably got to send out staff to go and check that the keys are actually in that lockbox and that the keys are ready for the next guest. So Keynest will provide you with a notification that the keys are actually dropped off and that the keys are being collected. So that's a game changer for hosts and companies as well. And then as I was saying before, you can manage all of your collection codes in one easy spot. just provides a lot of flexibility for hosts that want to manage, you know, a hundred plus keys. Ethan Brown: Yeah, definitely. It kind of ties in with my next question, which is key management is kind of one of those unsexy but critical parts of hosting and being a property manager. And I find, especially in Australia and New Zealand, compared to if I'm talking to a North American based ⁓ customer. the, I guess, implementation and the level of awareness around smart locks and key management is quite low. Like we, I don't know if I say, we're a little bit old school in this region and I've been guilty of that myself. And a lot of the implementation of that in North America and Europe is probably a little bit further ahead. Why do you think that it's been underserved in this region until now? Pierce Hattie: I suppose just people are just treating the check-in process a bit too lightly. know, it's not going be easy enough to just put a lockbox outside or I think I've seen a few reports of guests having to go on a bit of a wild goose chase to find a lockbox down a dark alley in a city or something like that. So yeah, I think people are just realizing that some of the check-in experiences can be. Ethan Brown: you Pierce Hattie: certainly show up in reviews. just taking that initiative to find a better option, something a bit more tech enabled is certainly a trend we're seeing. Ethan Brown: Yeah, for sure. think it's one of those things that you, there's two things. First of all, until you actually have that guest access issue or you have that security issue, like you don't know what you don't know. So people can often go through without needing to look for that sort of tech enabled solution. It's a bit like a host not using a property management software. Like you can get by. But then when you start wanting to sync your calendars or something like that, then you kind of realize, okay, I need to look into something, a solution that's actually gonna work for me here. And it's, think, the same with key management. We get by with our sort of old school processes. But then when you have those issues in terms of access, because it's one of the things that has the biggest impact on guest experience. If they have a smooth check-in process, if they can grab their keys quickly, ⁓ potentially without having to see the host or the property manager. I know that's really common. Like the guest wants to, like they want to be in their bubble with their partner or their family. They don't want to have to spend half an hour chatting to a host at the start of their stay. And each day is different. Like if you're potentially on a rural farm stay where you need to know about like locations of dams and bulls and I don't know, crocodiles, whatever it might be. Then yeah, you might want to have a half an hour chat to your host if you're staying on their land. If you're checking into an apartment in Melbourne CBD, for example, you probably don't want to spend half an hour chatting to your host if you've just flown in at 11 p.m. at night. So having the ability to automate and streamline that, it's not only good for your operations, but I think it's great for the guest experience too, which is something that's kind of forgotten with this whole like old school key management processes. ⁓ If it doesn't go well and they can't check in at 11 p.m., ⁓ then they're stuck outside or whatever it might be. That's going to have a pretty quick impact on your business. I would hazard a guess that there's probably a few listeners that have been in that situation in the past and probably prompted some of them to be listening. listening to us today. So ⁓ yeah, we'll come back to that in terms of ⁓ how you might be able to help or how we might be able to help with people in that situation. Before we get there, I'm interested to kind of pick your brain, given your industry experience and to learn what kind of trends you're seeing and how customers or posts, property managers approach check-in and access management ⁓ in the year 2026. Pierce Hattie: I would say it definitely varies city to city, but picking a place like Melbourne, for example, where the council will actually cut off lock boxes, it's really requiring ⁓ people to think outside the box and look at new solutions. So we've actually installed lockers in a few buildings, new construction buildings, because I think building managers of new construction buildings are actually taking into account. fact that many apartments are going to be short-term rentals. just having a keyness locker actually inside of the building is awesome for the guests and the hosts. It's all under one roof. so that's definitely a ⁓ trend that we're seeing in Melbourne. And ⁓ yeah, I think the other cities will follow for sure. Ethan Brown: Yeah, for sure. If you are a property manager and you're in that situation where you've got a building and you're hoping to have a lockbox, what's the best way for someone to get out to get in contact and get more information? Should they reach out to you directly or is the keyness website the best place? Pierce Hattie: Yeah, definitely either or. So the Keenest website has a locker sort of landing page where you can request to purchase one for a building or, you know, feel free to email me, piersetkeenest.com and I'll help you get one sorted for the new building or existing buildings, by the way. We've done that as well where it's already built in. It's just been a case of the building manager, you know, having the Ethan Brown: Awesome. Pierce Hattie: giving the green light and being on board with short term rentals. think that can be the issue with some, sometimes we've got buildings that are a bit in dispute over the whole process. Ethan Brown: Yeah, for sure. You mentioned purchasing, this might be a curveball for you, but do you have public pricing in terms of your purchasing and how much it costs for these lockboxes? Pierce Hattie: Yeah, definitely. So currently we've got three different sizes. So we've got nine slot lockers, 21 slot lockers and 39 slot lockers plus extensions available for all of them. So yeah, you're looking at between basically starting from 2200 to purchase the locker and then up to $3,000 for the larger sizes. And then there's a monthly software fee starting from 159 per month to run. the locker. yeah. Ethan Brown: Awesome. Cool. And I assume we're talking Aussie dollars. Yeah. Awesome. I love that. I always have to clarify because if we get some software companies will be quoting lower prices in USD and then you convert it to Aussie dollars and it's a lot higher. So that's excellent. Thank you. And I think a lot of listeners will definitely appreciate the transparency in terms of pricing. I think it's really important when you're trying to make your decisions around what product, what offering you're going to go for. Pierce Hattie: Aussied aus... Aussied aus dir. You Yeah. Ethan Brown: I'm curious what's next for Keynes. Is there any exciting features or expansions on the roadmap? Pierce Hattie: So we're definitely in talks with some exciting new retail partnerships, not confirmed yet, so I can't name any names, but yeah, we're always looking to bring on new exciting partnerships with operators with several hundred stores around Australia so that we can just broaden our horizons as far as how many keyness locations we have and that henceforth our customers can have more options where they can drop their keys. which is really what we're trying to do is just have so many keyness locations that you've got, you know, that they're very close by to the properties and there's multiple options to choose from. So I would say that's the exciting kind of roadmap we have ahead. It's just really broadening our scope of keyness points. Ethan Brown: Yeah, love it. That's excellent. That's really exciting. ⁓ I'm curious to know what those sort of expansion plans are that you guys have got going. And I think it might be a prompt maybe for us to get together again in the future. We might have to have another recording maybe in a year's time so we can kind of talk about where you guys go. Because I know it's a company that you guys are expanding and there's a lot of new things happening. So maybe we can cover. Pierce Hattie: Absolutely. Ethan Brown: those ⁓ in the future to see where you guys sort of went to from now to then. That's really cool. Before we wrap up, I'm interested if you've got any kind of final advice for hosts or property managers looking to level up their operations this year specifically. Pierce Hattie: Yeah, I think I'd just like to reiterate the spare keys options. So if you, you know, you might already have bases covered, but if you've got a 24 seven solution, you can pull back on if things go wrong. ⁓ that's invaluable, obviously in the, in the heat of the moment where there's a guest waiting. So I'll definitely consider what your closest 24 seven keyness point is and have a look at that. ⁓ we can also do some custom pricing for spare keys too. So don't hesitate to reach out if you got any properties in mind where you'd really like to set up a backup location. Ethan Brown: That's awesome. I love that. I some of our listeners may be aware throughout the year 2024, my wife and I did a lap of Australia in our caravan and we continued to operate our short-term rentals remotely. So we gave the remote self-manager test, we put it to the test 100 % because we were in some areas in remote Western Australia on some of those stations on the beach having a great time and we automated as much of it as possible. ⁓ We had, obviously we had a great operations and cleaner management team here locally in Queensland still. ⁓ but we also had to fall back on friends and family and instances where the people that we're employing weren't available for those sort of niche scenarios. I think backup keys or the option for access when other systems fail was definitely something I wish I had explored before we went on our trip, because that could have saved us a couple of times having to call up our parents and be like, hey, our cleaner or our operations manager can't get to the property. could you please grab these keys from here and go to there? If we had have just been able to tell a guest, hey, there's this location where you can go and grab your backup key, ⁓ if they've happened to lose them or whatever it might be, would have been really helpful. I think that's a great offering and I hope ⁓ more hosts, whether it's in Australia, New Zealand or globally, start to look into that and consider it because it can have a big impact when things do go awry or just in the day to day when you need to have that backup option. ⁓ So you touched on it already in terms of how customers can reach out to you. ⁓ Could you cover that again just real quickly in terms of your details and the best place to go forward if someone is interested to learn more? Pierce Hattie: Yeah, awesome. Yeah, absolutely. So my email is pierce.com. And yeah, either that or you can just go to keynest.com and you'll find a way to get in touch with me and the overall team. Also worth mentioning if you have if you find that there's not a key nest location set up near you, feel free to get in touch with us and we'll do our best to set one up wherever you are in Australia or New Zealand. And yeah, looking forward to this. hospitable integration and think hospitable users will get a lot out of it. Ethan Brown: Yeah, definitely. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me, Pierce. It was a great podcast and I think we covered a lot of really relevant content. Please do reach out to Pierce or myself ⁓ if you're wanting to learn more, because it's a really exciting integration and there's heaps of exciting things happening in the very near future there too. Thanks guys and thanks Pierce. Pierce Hattie: Thank you so much.