This week, discover another one of our clients, contributing to building the BookingSync community: BnbLord, a concierge services company specialised in short-term rentals in France and Lisbon. See how they approach the vacation rental market in our article.

Who’s BnbLord?

The company was founded in 2015, and manages several hundreds of properties. They can also assist future vacation rental investors, who are looking to purchase a property. BnbLord’s team is composed of almost 30 employees, and welcomes more than 3.000 travelers each month.

Hello Jacques, when first visiting your website, I’ve noticed you’re especially aiming at “investors”, as shown in your menu browser for example.

Indeed, since the beginning, we manage our concierge activity from a market data point of view.

Being settled in several cities, we can provide investors with information on the most profitable and ideal places for their investments, thanks to our apartments’ output history.

We can offer this service for each city where our concierge service is available.

We identify which property offers the best profile, we help the investor decorate it and then we handle the vacation rental activity.

For this service, we receive 4-5% of the purchase transaction amount.

We keep receiving more and more requests, particularly in Lisbon where the market has been massively expanding since 10 years.

Knowing the city from a tourist point of view, what travelers usually do, which tourist places are strategical and which transportation to use is an important part of the activity.

Another interesting fact, you mention a “Dynamic Pricing” and write about an algorithm helping generate 30% more profit. Could you tell me a bit more about it?

As I said previously, we focused on data since the beginning of our adventure. I had wrote my master’s thesis on how to find the right way to price a vacation rental apartment and determined that only 8% of the properties in Paris had a correct price, in 2016.

A great number of criteria is being taken into account: the seasonality, the events, we even work on the possibility to refine our criteria with micro-events.

Often, many pricing tools only work on major events taking place in a city, whereas not all the lodgings may be impacted by it.

Our owners have access to an interface allowing them to visualise their properties’ plannings and the prices advised by our internal tool. They’re free to change it and set their own price, but we highly recommend them to trust our market knowledge.

What’s your approach on all the legal changes being brought to the vacation rental market?

For now, we’ve only been impacted in Paris and Bordeaux. We communicate with our owners and inform them on commercial leases. We help owners the most we can so that we can all work in compliance with the law. Nevertheless, we also manage a lot of principal residences, which are not concerned by the new legislation.

Despite this, we think this new decree is a mistake, as the supply and demand would have naturally regulated the market. Airbnb is still highly expanding in big cities, though being reduced by half each year.

80% of our bookings are made through Booking.com in Montpellier. Booking is Airbnb’s real competitor in major French cities, but you don’t hear about it.

How do you stand out from your competitors? What’s your difference?

The mistake many concierges make is to consider themselves as simple rental managers, logistically speaking (cleaning, changing sheets).

A good concierge service should bring value to the owner and handle the pictures, the price, the check-ins and outs quality of service, and how to constantly optimise the property for their travelers’ comfort -and the listing’s success.

For example, we’ve tested and noticed that allowing travelers to check in autonomously -thanks to key boxes, or connected locks- may be ok for some, but our check-in mark was globally lower. Considering this, we prefer to welcome people physically.

We focus on value and rental return -pictures scenario, amenities recommendations- we see ourselves as real creators of rental value.

That’s also why we created our price algorithm, because we think the market’s algorithms are not correct.

- Jacques, BnbLord chief executive.

You can also find BnbLord on Facebook, Intagram and Twitter!

Today, we are announcing our latest partnership: Wheelhouse, a personalized pricing platform that helps vacation rental managers and owners maximize revenue and bookings with intelligent automation.

What is Wheelhouse?

Wheelhouse is the only pricing platform that allows you to build a customized pricing strategy around your unique business goals. The result is up to 40% more revenue, less time spent researching your competitors’ prices, and data-driven insights into your properties and market. That means you can run your short-term rental business as intelligently as a hotel.

Based in San Francisco, California, Wheelhouse helps thousands of owners and managers in 500+ markets all over the world and employs an experienced team of Ph.D Data Scientists, hotel revenue managers, rental professionals, and former Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Salesforce engineers and product specialists.

How to start using Wheelhouse Pricing

To get started, create a Wheelhouse account and connect your listings. It’s that simple. Then, preview their pricing recommendations, personalize your pricing strategy, and turn on Wheelhouse Pricing to enjoy automated, demand-driven prices year-round.

   
Already a BookingSync client? Get the Wheelhouse app from our App Center right now and follow Wheelhouse's webinar on July, 13, at 3:30pm CEST!

Didn't get the chance to watch our live webinar? Worry no more, we've got you covered with this recorded video below:

Today, let’s introduce you to one of our clients, specialised in concierge services and vacation rental management in France: Welkeys, a team of more than 500 concierges dedicated to owners and travelers, in the biggest French cities.

Hi Chloé, could you tell us a bit more about yourself and your company, Welkeys?

I’m Chloé Fournier, founder of Welkeys.com. Being a user myself of the Airbnb platform, as a host, I realised that managing the whole vacation rental logistics was hard -creating the listing, managing the bookings planning, welcoming and informing the travelers, cleaning and handling the household linen. That’s why I created Welkeys 2 years ago, the 1st platform connecting owners and concierges dedicated to short-term rentals. We’ve launched our turnkey offer in January 2017, Welkeys Premium®. This way, we can completely manage vacation rentals, for the owners: creating the listing with professional pictures, publishing it on several platforms, managing the bookings calendar, reservations and communication with the travelers, optimising prices depending on the season, coordinating check-ins, cleaning and managing the household linen in-between each stay with our Welkeys concierges. We’re currently a team of 10 people, working with 500 professional concierges. Our Welkeys Premium offer is available in 20 French cities, and in Marrakech.

What kind of rentals do you manage?

We own more than 100 apartments and houses in several major French cities such as Paris, Bordeaux, Marseille, Lyon, Nice, Toulouse, Montpellier, Nantes, Lille…but also in other cities like Dijon, Fontainebleau, Châtel, Annecy and in Morocco, in Marrakech! Our property portfolio is essentially composed of high-quality apartments and houses, which have been comfortably equipped -fitted kitchen, wifi…-. Most of them have been recently renovated. We aim to manage more than 300 apartments and houses by the end of 2017. We also plan to get international and expand in cities such as Brussels, Montreal and Lisbon.

What’s your best memory since you created Welkeys?

We recently welcomed a tennis player, who wanted to stay in one of our apartments while participating in Roland Garros, it was a real honor to get to meet him!

Which of your 100 houses and apartments would you like to stay in, during your next holidays?

In our amazing house in Marrakech, without a doubt! Picture yourself at the edge of the Palm Grove, in a fully-equipped 380m² house, surrounded by a 5,000m² garden and a dreamy swimming pool…

What makes Welkeys so special?

First of all, all of our concierge speak English and have completed a hotel management training. Every check-in we do is customised for each traveler. Once the booking is confirmed, we communicate with them in order to determine their needs. We offer several services, such as airport pick-up, luggage storage, breakfast delivery, at-home chefs and hairdressers, depending on what they need and thanks to our numerous partnerships. We’ve also created welcome kits with shower gel, shampoo and slippers in every rental.

-Chloé Fournier, Welkeys founder.

You can also follow Welkeys on Facebook, Intagram and Twitter!