Exploring New Air Sensor Technology with the CMO of WYND, Dora Du

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We'll start the show in just a minute, but first a word from our premier brand sponsor, casago, and co-sponsors, guest Ranger and Good Neighbor Tech.

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Casago's founder, steve Schwab, has been quoted as saying you can only be a local in one place. This simple yet profound statement is the basis of Casago's franchise model, which allows locally-owned vacation rental management companies the ability to compete at a national level by leveraging the system's software and support buying power of a much larger organization.

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As a Casago franchisee, you have the freedom to run your business with the support of a community of like-minded professionals, while leveraging the economies of scale and buying power to increase profitability and reduce operating costs.

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Good Neighbor Tech allows you to manage your properties remotely and intelligently, protecting your owners and your guests. Their smart Wi-Fi locks allow you to provide temporary access to home and garage from anywhere and keep track of when guests and service providers are in the property. Good Neighbor Tech provides the ability for you to collect email addresses from all guests staying in a property, not just the one who booked the reservation. Every guest who connects to the internet will see your branded welcome page and be prompted to provide their email address in order to connect to the Wi-Fi.

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Visit casagocom forge slash franchise guest rangercom and goodneighbertechcom for more information.

Speaker 3: 1:37

Welcome to Alex and Annie, the real women of vacation rentals. With more than 35 years combined industry experience, alex Hussner and Annie Holcomb have teamed up to connect the dots between inspiration and opportunity, seeking to find the one's story, idea, strategy or decision that led to their guest's big aha moment. Join them as they highlight the real stories behind the people and brands that have built vacation rentals into the $100 billion industry. It is today and now it's time to get real and have some fun with your hosts, alex and Annie.

Speaker 1: 2:14

Welcome to Alex and Annie, the real women of vacation rentals. I'm Alex and I'm Annie, and we are joined today with Dora Do, who is the CMO for WIND. Dora, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me.

Speaker 2: 2:28

We're excited to learn more about WIND. I think we met you and I had the opportunity to meet back at the RMA Spring Forum back in Kansas City and you told me a lot about what your business is. But for those of the people out there that don't know, why don't you tell us a little bit about you and a little bit about WIND?

Speaker 4: 2:46

Yeah, I've been with WIND for over four years now, but I've been working for the team basically from the inception of WIND, where startup tech startup based out of Silicon Valley focused around air quality indoor air quality and, yeah, we recently launched a product called WIND Sentry that helps protect short-term rentals from the risks around smoking and loud parties and unwanted disturbances.

Speaker 1: 3:16

So does parties, and so like a noise-aware kind of product where it's listening as well.

Speaker 4: 3:21

Yeah, what Sentry does is it's able to identify for different particle types, actually identify for cigarette, smoke, marijuana, as well as noise detection. So it's more of a comprehensive, more complete sense of sensors to help you monitor for unwanted incidences.

Speaker 1: 3:45

Yeah, yeah, great.

Speaker 2: 3:47

Now does it pick up a vape Like the vape pet. I know that's real big that people have used that in the dust blue smoke. Okay.

Speaker 4: 3:54

Yeah, yeah, it's a little so. The sensor technology is our own. It's proprietary. The founders who started the company are MITx rocket scientists who actually created the sensors themselves. So we actually started as an air quality company and we launched indoor air quality monitoring devices and purifiers and we found actually there is a decent subset of our customers who are property managers or customers used it to detect for these types of incidences and we're like, okay, this is interesting, maybe we should explore it. And that's where our house Sentry landed today.

Speaker 1: 4:35

So did you. When did the vacation rental side of the business start? Was that like round, or after COVID, or prior to that?

Speaker 4: 4:43

Yeah, so we launched our residential wind halo device a few years back and it wasn't intentional for us to actually sell to property managers and property owners, but they just started buying the product because they wanted alerts for pollutants. For example, being in California, there's a lot of wildfires. They're monitoring it for that and they're monitoring for general unwanted substances. We started getting a lot of customer responses and customer feedback on the product. One of them had said they had a product in the short-term rental and they saw these spikes in air pollutants so they went to go check out what was happening and they actually found someone cooking meth oh, wow.

Speaker 3: 5:31

Which is pretty crazy.

Speaker 4: 5:33

So then you know, investigate us a little bit more and we did a ton of customer research and we found that the short-term rental, hospitality, property rental space could actually find a really or the RAD, which is the technology behind it, could be a really good application for our technology.

Speaker 2: 5:56

So I sorted out in the hotel business and I remember that was always like a really big problem, especially during spring break, and if there was ever a rainy day, you knew it was going to be bad, because there were kids that were stuck in there in their rooms and they were partying and they were likely going to be doing all of the above. But of course you go into the room and you could smell it and they would be like oh no, we didn't. Everybody always denied that it's like oh the guest before us did that? Maybe not, but it's really hard to pinpoint unless you had something that could catch them in the act. So I think that when you were telling me about it, I was like the number of times that I had to, when I worked at the front desk, argue with the person about oh, you have to pay the fee to have the clean have the room, what is it? The ozone machines come in and sometimes carpet cleans and if they rent it and going into vacation rentals, you have to have the furniture cleaned and you have to have all this stuff done and people would balk at it. But now you're giving strength back to the manager to be able to say we have proof that you did this. My question is with the sensor, does it provide a report or does it provide an indicator, a recording of some sort that they can say look, you were in this room and we have this monitor and it picked up these microbes or whatever the terminology would be. But you pick up the scent or the smell or the scent that they've done it and you can show them proofs of that to be able to go back and say you have to pay for cleaning.

Speaker 4: 7:13

Yeah, for sure. So we have real-time monitoring where you can see. Basically the data come in real-time and there's real-time alerts as well as full-on reports. So generally what happens is, let's say, there's an incident, you'll get an alert for it and a lot of the time the property manager will call the guest or tenant and politely remind them to stop whatever's happening, in which case a lot of time they stop, but if they don't, you get a full report that you can use. So in the case of short-term rentals that can be submitted to the guest, or the air cover or other policies that will help you reimburse those costs. We actually do work with hotels as well and it's really helpful to make sure that you can get reimbursement for those costly damages. But also use that for charge facts, because sometimes guests will say that, hey, we didn't do it. But if you actually have the full report, then you actually have that, because it's very much he said, she said and you can't really show odor that's basically sticking to the paint in your walls, it's in your furniture and your whole street and carpets. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 8:27

Yeah, it's interesting. There's technology. I feel like that. You're probably not positioning it this way directly, but what it does is it definitely enables property managers to really use something like a wind or also any guest ranger that we've talked to to help with homeowner acquisition. Really, this is a way that for property managers that use this to be able to say to their owners that this is going to protect your property, that it's going to protect your furnishings, it's going to make sure that there is one added layer of protection that I'm offering for you as your property manager, as a professional property manager, to make sure things go right. So I think, coming out from that perspective, it's got to be pretty effective for a lot of property managers.

Speaker 4: 9:07

Yeah, for sure, the key thing is peace of mind. Right, it's peace of mind. Yeah, can you see, it's peace of mind for the owner, it's peace of mind for the property manager and for future incoming guests, because, yeah, it's really important to make sure that the community is happy and you're not disturbing the community. Like you said, with property managers, they can add an extra level of service. We can make sure that there's not going to be unwanted disturbances. And then for the guests, they know that this is a property that's being managed well and there's not incidences of smoke that's going to be lingering when they stay there, and especially that of kids and whatnot. You just want to be able to stay in a really fresh, comfortable home.

Speaker 2: 9:51

Yeah, so is the mechanism like an intrusive piece of machinery? Or is it attached to a vent where they don't see it Like I'm thinking is our way of guess sees it and they are able to disable it? Or is it something that's hidden in the unit as well?

Speaker 4: 10:10

Yeah, so it's basically like a pretty discreet white disc. It looks like a white disc and essentially we made it so that it's tamper-proof and we did this in multiple ways. Let's say, if it is tampered with you get an alert notification, but we also have extended battery life, so someone tries to plug it, it'll continue to work over time. So we want to make sure that, because there will be guests who might try and tamper with it. But we made it the physical desire to be as tamper-proof as possible and as discreet as possible.

Speaker 2: 10:47

Certainly helps to have MIT people designing things.

Speaker 1: 10:50

Yeah, wrong design.

Speaker 2: 10:52

They can think of all the ways it can go wrong. I'm sure.

Speaker 1: 10:55

Yeah, yeah. What was your background before Dorm? I'm just curious more about you also, Like obviously you've been in marketing, but what else have you done prior to the wind?

Speaker 4: 11:05

Yeah, I originally studied at McGill University. I'm Canadian.

Speaker 1: 11:09

Oh okay.

Speaker 3: 11:10

Yeah.

Speaker 4: 11:11

And I worked in consumer health. I've worked in consumer health and consumer goods. I worked at LVMH and Wreckit Ben Keaser, which is where I started my initial furoroi and air quality. So when I was at Wreckit, I focused on data-driven marketing and led an innovation team to launch an air quality brand in China and India, which is actually where I met Wind and the team, because we're looking for an air quality sensor that we could partner with.

Speaker 1: 11:39

Yeah.

Speaker 4: 11:39

Okay, and this is really early days with the co-founders, ray and Jason, the first couple of years partnered with them launched their device and then ended up moving over to the wind team about, yeah, four or five years ago, gotcha.

Speaker 1: 11:53

Gotcha. So one of your overall observations of the short-term rental industry, since you've been in it on this side of things, I think, being on the technology side, and especially this kind of tech, there's not a whole lot of companies out there like what you do, maybe some of the noise side, but not on the wind that I know of or air but what do you think so far? What do you think about the industry and what has been your experience with it?

Speaker 4: 12:17

Yeah, I think the industry has been evolving so rapidly. I think it's become, initially, many things is very manual and there's such a fast movement towards automation. Everyone wants to automate as much as they possibly can. So you're seeing basically remote access, management, remote security and, with it becoming this short-term rental space and vacation rental space being so democratized, regulations are trying to find ways to keep up. So technology is helping that and I think that's where we were able to find our niche in helping out the space be accessible to as many people while maintaining safety and comfort. Yeah, with respect to our business. Obviously, with the democratization of vacation rental or short-term rental space, it's hard to keep up with the regulatory environments and you might have guests who are more disruptive to communities, and making sure that they're kept safe by being able to identify for unwanted incidences or deter these types of unwanted events ensures that the vacation rental space can operate safely.

Speaker 2: 13:31

So you said that you guys work a lot with the hotel sector as well. What do you see are differences between the two sectors? We have the conversation on the show a lot about technology in our space and I alluded to. I started out in hotels and so I have a hotel background that I moved into vacation rentals pretty early on. The technology within our industry has moved in some respects, pieces of it, past the hotel sector in a lot of the revenue management tools that we have, a lot of the PMSs, that we have a lot more functionality, and so I'm just curious, from your perspective, working with both sides, do you see one innovating quicker than the other? Or do you think that we're in the similar space in terms of animation and, I guess, adopting the technology?

Speaker 4: 14:16

Yeah, I think. I think With the short-term rental space it seems like the adoption is so much quicker, and actually we notice that in our own business when we launched our product too. It's just because with the Marriots or the larger hotels it's at such higher volumes, you need to make sure that it meets all the requirements within the franchise, whereas of a brand the smorcher Rantles. Yeah, it's more customizable. I think in general the operating model is more flexible, so they're able to test with different technology at a faster rate. Yeah, we've seen the adoption of technology move much quicker on the short-term rental space and almost like lead in terms of like for things like access management. I think short-term rental space was able to adopt that quicker and now you're seeing a lot more of that in boutique hotels and then maybe eventually even in some larger chain branched-pistols as well.

Speaker 2: 15:13

That's good to know. We feel like that we have. Our industry has gone a little further and a little ahead of the curve for the hotels, but it is interesting. I was curious what your thoughts were. Our perception was actually the reality out there.

Speaker 1: 15:27

Yeah yeah, absolutely. It wasn't like that for a long time. Yeah, for a very long time we were really work-cut in the dark ages and building a lot of in-house tech but we talk about this on the show quite a bit that just COVID put rapid fire under so much development and it's definitely it was necessary. I think the technology like what you have built and how that also not just on the homeowner side, but also, like you mentioned, on the regulation side and how communities can use some of these things to point to you that this is what true professional managers are using to make sure that we are good stewards of the property and the community. We just had Tiffany Edwards on the show recently and she said that when COVID hit and they went to Governor DeSantis to get him to understand what short-term rentals were and to not keep them closed, that he, as well as many people in office across country, are amazed and just didn't know all the technology that we're able to offer. So I think there's a lot of misconceptions that people think it's just about putting your property on Verbeau or Airbnb and then you're just making this money and you don't care and you're not taking care of the area or the locals that live near there, so it's sometimes a change quite a bit, but it's exciting to see stuff like what you guys are building.

Speaker 4: 16:42

Yeah, it's crazy to see the growth in this market and the growth in people actually relying on short-term rental space or property management as their livelihood. When we talk to our customers, they'll talk about how they've invested all their money in these properties and they need to make sure that they're maintained well, Otherwise they can't put foot on the table. Yeah, so livelihood.

Speaker 2: 17:09

So you mentioned that you do the sound monitoring as well. Does it actually record, or is it just simply like decibel measures? Yeah, so it's all privacy safe.

Speaker 4: 17:21

Yeah, it's just decibel levels, so you're actually able to adjust the different decibel levels and the noise duration, and we've basically put algorithms of that certain outlier type events. Let's say someone. If there's a really loud bang because people drop, or someone was in the kitchen and dropped a bunch of pots and pans, I wouldn't share any alerts. Yeah, for us, what was really important in both the noise and the smoke detection was to reduce false alerts and false positives, because we wanted to make sure that property managers were wasting time chasing false positives and contacting the guests unnecessarily.

Speaker 2: 18:06

Does it? You're talking about the alerts that you get. Do you guys have an app that it goes to, or is it something tied to a phone number? How does the alert to the manager work in this case?

Speaker 4: 18:16

Yeah, the way that it works is everything's within an app. So we have our WinCentury app and you can have an SMS text. You can also have it emailed to you as well, but there's an in-app alert.

Speaker 2: 18:30

Very cool. And does the reporting? Is that like on a cloud function where it's like a main Azure could come in on a Monday and say these units had these issues like where they get a full report by unit, or how does that all go, get reported back to them?

Speaker 4: 18:45

Yeah, so you can click into the app and actually basically export the report, and it's by unit and within the unit you can basically designate which property, in which room it is, which room it's in.

Speaker 2: 19:00

Okay and does the. So I'm really fascinated by the reporting piece of it. Does the reporting, does it back up somewhere? Say they can't get to the app like it's on, like a cloud based system that they would be able to say, maybe register a guest so they know that this guest has been. I know some of the systems that have for just the security measures that they do on guests, background checks and those type of things, they can have a guest loaded in their system. But is there a way, or would they have to load it onto a guest, like their history of their account, that they were an offender in this way and you could attach a report that said they stayed in this unit and they smoked in it and then they booked again and you're like, oh, I can be alerted that this guest stayed in XYZ unit, they smoked, and I might be able to stave it off beforehand or be aware that they are someone who has committed this sin, if you will, in this scenario, like it's all housed somewhere so they can access it later.

Speaker 4: 19:54

Yeah, so we have all the historical reporting that's kept on the cloud. If there is need for access, it's definitely accessible. We don't, and apologies if I didn't understand correctly, but we don't link it to guests right now. We don't have a database of historical offenders, call them. But it's definitely something that we can consider doing in the future or partnering with different organizations that might be able to do that with us.

Speaker 1: 20:26

How do companies engage with you? What does the pricing model for this?

Speaker 4: 20:31

Yeah, on our website on helloweencom. Basically you can buy an annual or a monthly. So the annual is $180 and right now we're actually giving the hard work for free, oh well. And then monthly, it's $19 a month. If you have more than five properties, you can contact us and then we can work out. Try to understand your business a little bit more and see if there's other ways to work together.

Speaker 1: 20:57

Yeah, Awesome. That's actually pretty affordable really. If it's a company that has high volume units, is there a volume discount? I would imagine they could probably talk to you about that, yeah exactly, yeah.

Speaker 4: 21:09

So there's also volume discounts, and part of the reason why we're able to make it more cost effective is because a lot of the technology is proprietary and we were able to develop it ourselves. Yeah, I got some.

Speaker 1: 21:22

Dara, I would like to know what is your career so far that you've experienced within in case you're in rentals with wind and then previously with other company what's been the big aha moment of your career so far?

Speaker 4: 21:36

It's an interesting question. I think when I was working for RB in data driven marketing, I was supporting a lot of the basically like data analytics and marketing efforts behind a lot of the household brands and I realized I wanted to do something that was impactful, mercially, but also was more purpose-driven. Then this opportunity came in what they called the innovation pod, to be able to develop a brand around air quality. At the time this is prior to COVID, where air pollution was really top of mind in places like China and India, but maybe not as much in the Western world. I thought that was a really interesting space. I think that was probably one big piece. My family is quite heavily involved in real estate On their side. Basically, it started when my parents. They came to Canada as immigrants and didn't come with a lot of money. When they bought their first house, they actually started renting out a portion to help pay for the mortgage. Over time, they were able to invest in additional properties and actually make a living off of real estate Real estate investing. I think it's almost like now that that history tied with being able to do something in air quality that's both purpose-driven as well as impactful, I think is not, yeah, like a full circle moment.

Speaker 1: 23:04

Yeah, I was just saying I think that's really cool. I love that.

Speaker 2: 23:08

What do you think is next on the horizon for wind?

Speaker 4: 23:12

We're going to continue developing RAD. It's basically an AI, machine learning, trained sensor for air quality. On the roadmap we have mold detection. We have some other really exciting new features. We actually can choose things like pet dander and pollens. We're looking at how we want to release that with a sensory device. Yeah, it's basically continuing to develop our RID and really be able to help understand our indoor environment by identifying different types of air particles.

Speaker 2: 23:45

Yeah, so it sounds like you guys could go into the individual home space like just the regular consumer to have mold detection and pollen and those type of things. I know that, living in Florida, we have a lot of those issues and, alex, I imagine you do in South Carolina as well. In the summer there's just times when you have these storms that come through and you don't know that water's creaked into a place so you end up getting molded mildew and then by the time you find it it's too late. I would think. Having detection for that I knew growing up we had a basement and that was always a concern for my parents because we were all allergic to it. So I think that there's some practical uses for an individual family to use in their home. So I'm excited to see where you guys take all this.

Speaker 4: 24:25

Yeah, for sure. It's basically like a lot of the particles in the air are invisible and we're just trying to make it visible so people can do something about it. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 24:36

It's a great concept and very purpose driven for sure and, I think, a very bright future for you and the team. So we're excited to watch your growth continue. But if anybody wants to get in touch with you, if they want to find out more how to get involved, what's the best way to reach out?

Speaker 4: 24:52

Yeah, either there's contact us forums on helloandcom that's H-E-L-O-W-Y-N-Dcom, or honestly just reach out to me directly at dorad-o-r-a, at helloandcom.

Speaker 1: 25:05

Okay, great, great. If anybody wants to contact Annie and I, you can go to alexandannipodcastcom. If you're enjoying the show, we would love to hear from you if you could leave us a review on Apple or Spotify or YouTube or whatever you watch or listen to the podcast and until next time, thanks everybody.