Live from VRMA Nashville: What Operators and Vendors Are Actually Talking About

Introduction

What's up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Get Paid for Your Pad. This is going to be a very special episode because I'm actually coming to you live from VRMA in Nashville, Tennessee. There are 2,500 people here. It's the biggest event in our industry, and we have a whole bunch of team members here.

We have an amazing booth and we're super excited. During this conference we're going to talk to different operators and vendors, ask them what they're learning, what's happening, what people are talking about. In this podcast, I'm going to take you on this journey so you can learn vicariously through us, even though you're not at VRMA.

An Operator's First VRMA

We're based in Colorado, Summit County. I'm a first-time attendee at VRMA this year, so excited to be here. A lot of quality vendors, and I'm actually a new client of Freewyld Foundry's RPM revenue management as well, so excited to work with you guys on that. We do high-end luxury properties in Summit County: Breckenridge, Keystone, Frisco, Copper Mountain. Higher format, larger format luxury properties. We just grew ten new properties, so things are going well.

What are you trying to get out of the conference? It's nice to meet people face to face. A lot of my vendors I've never met in person before, so I'd like to do that, put a face to the name, and get some new ideas with some new disruptors coming here.

Talking With Austin, One of Freewyld's Revenue Managers

We're talking to Austin here, one of our revenue managers on our team. He's well known in the industry, having been in it for a long time.

How many times have you been at VRMA? This is my second VRMA conference, the first one since 2024. What do you think is the biggest value for operators and property managers attending a conference like this? I think the biggest value is just seeing vendors face to face. Putting a face to a name rather than just over a Zoom screen has been the biggest value. It adds that extra value. They see that we're out here doing what we're doing, trying to make the best out of it, and I think it goes a long way for operators to see us here.

Our industry is so stratified. People are operating in their own parts of the country, and getting together to connect with people who are going through the same problems, just in different parts of the country, really matters. It's quite an individual pursuit being a host. When you come to something like this, you can forget because everyone's together, but after a few days everyone goes back to their corner of the world and starts working on their business again. So when you're outside of conference season, you need educators and people you can learn from, people who can guide the next generation of hosts so they don't make the same mistakes on the way.

Frank Bossi on the Value of Face-to-Face Connection

We are here with Frank Bossi, the one and only. How's it going, man? It's been an absolute whirlwind. We got in at 7:30 at the booth and had constant people passing by and talking. It's been interesting to see how many property managers there are. This year has been a lot busier than last.

What would you say is the biggest value that operators and property managers can find at these conferences? I think it's just the face-to-face interactions with people you talk to daily over a computer. Putting a face to a name, but then building a relationship with that person adds more intimacy and value to that partnership. Even when people stop by our booth, it sets up a new relationship for when we get back, because now we know them, we met them in person, and it strengthens that relationship.

Any topics you see people talking about this year? AI always takes the cake, especially where AI is going, what it offers now, and how property management software is absorbing that. Not to take over the business, but to leverage it so property managers can focus elsewhere, whether that's accounting, numbers, growth, or scalability.

Beyond Pricing on Private Equity and Consolidation

We're talking to Brian at Beyond Pricing. How's the conference going for you guys? It's been great. A lot of new companies, new faces, new products launching. What are people talking about this year? There's a lot of movement in the private equity space and how that's changing the face of the industry, plus technology consolidation. There's also a lot of talk about revenue management strategies and what companies are doing to optimize their revenue.

PriceLabs on Launching Athena

Of course I have to talk to PriceLabs. I'm here with Thibault Masson. How's it going? How are you enjoying the conference? Fantastic conference, happy to be in Nashville for the first time, loving the vibe.

What are you learning this year? Yesterday I was hosting a session about AI adoption, taking people through different functions like marketing, supply, and owner relations, whether they were just starting out or already in an adoptive or transformative mode. People were super enthusiastic, cracking open laptops and comparing notes with each other. Last year people liked listening to information about AI. This year it's more like sharing notes and comparing so much. I think people are saying, yes, we're on it, we want to go to the next stage.

What's the number one thing you're focused on right now? Yesterday morning we launched Athena, our AI revenue analyst. It's not a chatbot, not something waiting for you to ask the right question to get the right answer. It's a big agent running in the background, going through your portfolio and saying, have you thought about this, have you considered that, suggesting what to do while you stay free to accept or not. It helps people save time thinking through different strategies. It's not just about finding mistakes, it's about finding opportunities.

How do people get access to that? It's free in beta. There's a waitlist, you go to a PriceLabs page and fill in a simple form. We're also focused a lot on everything that goes into revenue management that isn't just price. We just released our Owner Hub, which includes projections, a listing lens that helps optimize Airbnb listings, and owner reporting. We've also expanded enterprise features to include a portfolio manager that helps identify gaps in a portfolio that are over- or under-performing the market, so you can address anomalies.

You recently built an Airbnb listing optimizer. What's that about? It was built to address a client need. Several clients came to me with OTA optimization as a pain point, so we built a solution that takes all of a client's listings as a batch portfolio and spits out recommendations across the board. Not just listing optimization like titles and amenities, but everything from the pricing calendar to guest reviews, producing a 3-to-4-page recommendation PDF.

One listing optimization tip for people listening? Your photos. The photo analysis was one of the big things I built into the tool. It looks in depth at each picture: resolution, what's in the picture, whether you're putting a description on each one, which is a big indicator of the score you get. My biggest tip is consistently changing the order of pictures on a healthy cadence, and looking at that in-depth analysis.

AutoHost and Truvi on Guest Screening

We're here with Ella at AutoHost, a tool we've been using for years at Freewyld. How's it going? Last night was a blast, we took clients and friends out on a party bus through Nashville.

We are here at the Truvi stand, formerly known as SuperHog. Tell us more about what Truvi does. We're concerned about guest damage. We want hosts and guests to transact more confidently. As a host, you want to take bookings, and the last thing you want to do is stop bookings. But if you don't know who that guest is, it makes you nervous about taking the booking, and it might keep you from investing in direct bookings. You'd stick with the old channels that have always worked, but you're leaving revenue on the table and losing the chance to grow your own brand. We give people that extra bit of confidence through screening, then protect it with damage protection for accidental, malicious, or deliberate guest damage. A win for me is when a customer says, you've helped me open up more direct channels, caught the odd troublemaker, and paid out when things go wrong. That's the whole spectrum of risk we work in: verification, fraud prevention, chargeback, and making sure you know who's walking through the door. We launched in April, and VRMA is the first time we've brought it to market this way.

What do you think are going to be some of the hot topics this year? We're in a period, relatively from ten years ago, of almost losing the battle slightly with hotels when it comes to regulation. We're in a challenging time in urban Europe and urban US. We've got metro mayors all over Europe putting the brakes on short-term rentals. We have to react to that and show we're professional, that we're providing a useful accommodation type within a city. We have to raise the experience, because hotels have been doing that forever, and they understand we're in the experience industry. That's what gets people coming back to a short-term rental, not just booking direct. If we all do that collectively, we'll get people to come back to our lodging type, and that's the long game.

What Makes Guests Come Back

I was a guest a couple of weeks ago, and we talked at a panel about how you get guests to come back. I started thinking about which of the 150 Airbnbs I've stayed at I would come back to. I realized there are only about five that really come to mind, and all five of those, the host did something different than any other host. One picked me up at the airport. One had amazing check-in instructions with videos and a whole PDF, and it was super easy to find the house and check in. I still remember it because it stood out.

We need to create unique experiences for our guests that are memorable. If you don't remember it, you're not going to come back. It should be the easiest thing in the world for a guest who's had a good experience to share the link with a buddy on email or WhatsApp and say, check out this place I just stayed, it was awesome, great host. People do what other people have done, because everyone's a little nervous about a vacation, especially with kids. If you get it right, people will come back because they want certainty. If we can't offer that extra bit of trust, they'll default to a hotel resort booking because it's a known quantity. People are giving us their precious vacation time, and we have to go the extra mile.

40 Properties and Staying There on Purpose

What is one piece of advice from your experience that you'd give to newer and smaller operators? I would try to go super high-quality, luxury properties and keep your door count down, your quality really high. We're at 40 properties and we want to stay in that 40-to-50 range, so we can keep driving really high-quality guest experiences, five-star resort experiences, without losing that touch with our homeowners and our guests.

A lot of people, especially in the beginning, are just focused on adding more units, saying yes to everybody, onboarding properties that don't fit their brand or working with partners they don't want to work with. Then once you're at 20 or 30, you realize you don't want to work with these people or these properties, and you have to go through it all again. Really think about your brand and who you want to work with, and what properties you want to manage.

Scaling to 400 Properties in Aruba

We're here with a true legend, the king of Aruba. How many properties do you have in Aruba? We're at 400. There's a lot of vacation rentals in Aruba, but we try our best.

How do you grow from zero to 400? Persistence, consistency, and lots of learning. I put into practice the lessons I learned, and we went from 100 to 400 in three years.

What are you learning here at the conference? The networking is key. You get to learn from everybody, people who have so much experience and know so much about different markets. You see vendors, keep yourself up to date. It's good to see people once a year and share problems and solutions and try to get better.

Closing: Best in Show

We're about to close up here at VRMA, end of day two. It's been an absolutely fantastic conference. We want to thank the organization for putting together this event. We learned a lot, we won Best in Show for our booth, bananas, we were not expecting it. We met so many of our clients, and did a little bit of partying, not too much, because these conferences are exhausting.

Apparently they announced we won at the general session that morning, and since we had no idea, we didn't even have someone there to accept the award. They came over to the booth and interviewed us. People started coming to the booth saying, you guys won, and we were like, what did we win?

We hung out with our team members, it's been an absolutely amazing event. Tomorrow everyone's flying back to their locations. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. It was definitely fun to put this all together. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you at the next event.