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!