From Hunches to Hard Data: Why Asset Intelligence Matters When Buying STRs, with Paul Kromidas

Alex Husner  3:07  
Welcome to Alex & Annie, the real women of vacation rentals. I'm Alex, and I'm Annie, and we are joined today by PaulKormidas, who is the CEO and founder of Summer the whole season. Paul, nice to meet you.

Paul Kromidas  3:22  
Thank you both for having me. 

Annie Holcombe  3:23  
Yeah, thank you so much. It's nice to finally meet you. I believe I did a little session with some people back in December. It was kind of focused on the STR space, and you guys were gracious enough to sponsor it so we could give away some really fun gifts, and we had a lot of good turnout and a lot of good conversation. So I wanted to learn more about you. We didn't get a chance to do it. So before we get started, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about your story and how you got to summer.

Paul Kromidas  3:48  
Yeah, got my start in the industry through, I guess, an interesting pathway. I used to or started off working at Airbnb, actually, at HQ, way back when. So this is, you know, probably eight years now, came in. Initially, I was, you know, I was doing M and A work. I was out in the west coast. And, you know, Airbnb was acquiring a few companies at that point. One of them was company called luxury retreats. Got brought in to help them figure out what to do with that company once they bought it, where it was plugging into Airbnb, what they were going to build next, which ended up being the Airbnb Lux product. That was a great experience. Ended up loving my time there with the team and what we were building, and joined up shortly thereafter that spent a few years building product at Airbnb, so transitioned over to that team. Built, you know, you think of it, I probably built it. Had a hand in building it at some point, review flows, growth tools, internal tooling for the teams there at Airbnb. So, you know, the stuff you're interacting with on the app on a daily basis. Well, maybe not anymore. It's been, been a bit but at least formally. And that was, yeah, that was my formal sort of pathway, or intro into the space. Eventually, you know, started baking on some ideas while I was there, of ways to start my own business in the space. I think, you know, I enjoy. In the short term rental space. Because to me, it's, I joke with people all the time, I'm like, short term rentals are a bit like the Wild West, and in a good way, right? It's a nascent space. It's been growing now for years. You know, it's really become something that I think, you know, like I wasn't alive. But if you think back a couple 100 years ago, you know, there's a lot of opportunity out there to just go and be had by enterprising people trying to start their own businesses, trying to start something out in, you know, new new territories of the country. And I think short term rentals is a lot, a lot of the same. You know, I encounter people every day, who are, you know, starting with just a couple units, trying to grow something they've gotten into a much larger place. There's software providers trying to start something up. So it's a growing space. It's a fun space. There's a lot happening. Excited to be in it.

Alex Husner  5:46  
Yeah, no, I'm on the site right now, and it's interesting. I mean, definitely there's a lot of great content on here, but it's kind of like you're it looks like the connector between you want people to be able to come to your site and easily be able to find, you know, different options for these different parts of the industry, and then what's that handoff like? I see the Connect expert? Yeah,

Paul Kromidas  6:06  
we actually had two sort of sites and businesses that we maintain. So to clear up any confusion, formally, we were an owner and operator in the space. We had an interesting model at summer that We fundraised on a number of years back, called gradual ownership. So it's basically a rent tone model on vacation home ownership. So this case, I'll use an example. If you wanted to buy a property that we didn't, you didn't know if it would be a good short term rental or a bad short term rental, just a second home vacation on whatever it may be, we would actually help you find that property, say whether that property would perform positively or negatively, even if it wasn't a short term rental, before we do a full analysis on it, design it, furnish it, get it up and running, and then let you buy it back two years later at a slightly appreciated price. Yeah, it was, it was, it was great. Full of, full of excitement, getting, getting that business off the ground. We got it off the ground successfully, or raised about 11 and a half million in our first round of funding back in 2020 2021 on that, and then follow that up with a another $18 million round in 2023 so in addition to $50 million in debt to deploy into buying those assets, you know, we decided along the way, started looking around at the prop tech landscape and a lot Of the companies that have gotten started owning and the venture capital space. I don't know what your experience is with venture capital in that space, but it just doesn't really work with the four walls of real estate. When they invest, VCs are looking for AI software returns that look something more like that. And you know, real estate doesn't really look like that, nor should it. It's more like that. So I think, you know, adding nice conversation with the folks on our end our board, and, you know, talked about what the future would really hold for us. And I think we figured out we had something more exciting internally for the world, which was our asset management software. So what we had initially tried to solve was we'd go out and, you know, identify these homes that maybe had or had not been short term rentals, and say that one's a good short term rental. Why? You know, how are we going to actually underwrite to that? What's the full real estate? Underwrite the IRR, if you're doing a DSCR loan on it, what do you what can you expect to get? Can you credibly underwrite to that? Right? And you don't just get a full high level style level revenue estimate for that. You actually have to go out and and perform to that. So, you know, with two or three years of operating track record behind us, we figured out we were actually pretty good at hitting the mark on those initial underwrites, and built out a nice suite of asset management software internally that we're now turning around and selling to the market. So we sold off our asset ownership and management business last year. Maintained, as you alluded, to our legacy website there, which we sort of turned into, if you want to crudely analogize, you know, folks who are fans of nerd wallet or a site like that that let you connect to a lot of different providers in the space to find what you're looking for via short term rental. That's what we're trying to do with our Go summer website. And then separately, summer os.com is our website for our new asset management software, which we officially launched earlier this year.

Annie Holcombe  9:11  
So I'm curious about the asset management one of the conversations that I think has been, I've had with a lot of people on like the STR side, and we have this conversation all the time, is like, VR, STR, STR, VR, they're kind of different, but they're similar. How do you look at an asset these days and try to really understand what the potential is based on the last couple of years? Because we know that the post covid numbers are almost an anomaly. Everybody would love to have it happen again, but nobody's willing. No, we're not going to go. Nobody wants to go through that again to get there. So there's that idea of, like, how do you how do you normalize what that looks like for somebody to manage an asset, to decide to go into this business? I mean, is that something that you guys have found a sweet spot in, that you can help people with 100%

Paul Kromidas  9:55  
I think that's that's become really our forte. And I think, like a lot of things. It comes with conviction around the number of data points that you have at your disposal. I say this to people all the time. I think what's most valuable about what we do is also the biggest challenge, right when you look at this space. You know, short term rentals have existed for decades. But, you know, I think a lot of us can look to, you know, Airbnb started in 2008 that sort of, you know, regardless of whatever your feelings are about Airbnb, that definitely caused a lot of spotlight to come to the space, and it drew a lot of attention to the space, and a lot of people started understanding more about short term rentals outside of just, you know, smaller vacation rental markets that I think it operated, you know, longer term than that. And I think what you found when you looked at that is, you know, when you compare short term rentals versus SFR, single family, residential or commercial real estate or multifamily, some of these other segments in real estate, and a lot of them have been around in that sense, for you know longer, have churned through the data. And have, you know, if you're trying to underwrite a home for regular rent, man, you might have decades of data to point to on rents dating back to the 50s or the 40s, and I remember doing this research when we first started the business. And you really don't find a ton of data in short term rentals, like structured data, that you can actually point to with any sort of credibility before the mid 2010s right? That's really as far back, yeah, for sure, absolutely, yeah.

Paul Kromidas  11:23  
So I think, you know, we really take, we go as far back as we can get it. We do a lot to normalize it, clean the data. There's, you know, sometimes you're getting duplicate data points. You have to make sure you're standardizing in certain markets. And, you know, everyone says this, but you know, we kind of have our own secret sauce of how we do different inputs and what we're assigning different weights to and scoring to, but I wholeheartedly grieve if you're just looking at 2020, and 2021, it's a total anomaly. If you're looking at, you know, one year after, when you know, interest rates were pretty high, maybe that might be an anomaly too. I think you've really got to take the whole the whole thing, into consideration to really get the accurate the accurate measurement.

Alex Husner  12:03  
Now that's that's interesting. I'm just looking on your site still too, and there's some familiar faces that I see on there, Taylor Jones being one of them. I see him on LinkedIn all the time, it seems like lately. But who is your ideal customer for this?

Paul Kromidas  12:16  
It's interesting. Think there's really three buckets of folks that we're selling to finding primary traction or early traction with right now, there's professional owners and operators, right? I think that's an easy one for us, because, you know, in a lot of ways, we were one ourselves, so this was an internal tool that we found a lot of help and use for, and didn't see out there in the market. So it's no surprise to me that a lot of other operators and owners are finding use for it, you know. And I'd term those as you know, anyone from, let's call it 50 units, 40 units, up to, you know, 1000s of units, 2000 3000 units. The second bucket of folks is sort of what I think a lot of folks refer to as the long tail. So individual owners and operators, maybe you've got one or two units, maybe up to 10. But you know, I think you're not. You might have a small business yourself, but maybe you don't have a team of people with a sales team and a revenue management team and all these other things around you, right? You haven't gotten to that, that stage of it yet, if you if you ever want to. And then the third bucket, I think, is really interesting, which is the investors, real estate capital, allocators, underwriters, folks like that, right? I tell people all the time, you know, if you're familiar with finance, you may have come across like a Bloomberg terminal at some point or another. I think our tool is the deepest in the market, and it may only make sense that we use this to analyze properties at a real estate level for investment, and then bringing that, bringing that underwrite to lenders and to capital allocators, and saying, We can, we're confident we can hit these IRRs or these numbers. So it only makes sense that those folks are looking to our tool as a way to launch properties themselves and underwrite other folks to that same criteria. Do

Annie Holcombe  13:59  
you guys go out there and identify markets. Or are you using all these data sources to kind of see what's popping up, and then you kind of dig in from

Paul Kromidas  14:06  
there? Yeah. So there's really two segments of the tool right now. So there's sort of what we'll call the pre purchase, or I should, I should really call it the pre go live portion of the tool, right? So if you're operating the unit, or you plan to operate the unit. It's everything that happens before. So there's a whole step into the tool covers the entire United States right now. Lets you analyze any asset out there. You can type in a drop a link with you know, up to it off of Zillow or any other site. You can put an address in. You can analyze a market. So you can identify markets that are hot or not. You can underwrite any asset. It can be, you know, parents, house, if you want, if you inherited something you want to see with that right, like you can do anything, doesn't need to be for sale. We actually will spotlight homes that are for sale, and you can dive in from there and take those into consideration. And, you know, I think that gives a lot of people the. Ability to go across the country and see a lot of what's happening in different markets and different homes, and then separately, once the home is actually gone live, or you are looking to get it live, you've gotten it into your PMS. We partner with all these PMS is out there in the space we aren't competitive with PMS is, I don't, I don't, I don't think it's a winning proposition to go out and try to compete with that. So for a guesty and host away and track and whatnot. So instead, we want to partner with them. We know that a lot of people are having success with them and like them, and want to stick with their PMS. So we just sort of sit on top of that, ingest some of that data and mix it with our data to be able to show you, once that home goes live, you've actually underwritten that property, it's going to switch over here, and then it's going to be in your portfolio of you. So you'll be able to track your homes, any any amount of homes in your portfolio, whether it's 110, you know, 1000s, against historicals, the best competitive sets in your market, different competitive sets if you, let's say you're on a beach market, and you add a pool to the property, okay, well, you can track it against the comp set of homes that are very similar with pools and without pools. Let's say you can have a variance report on how you're doing versus, you know, where you projected to be, and things like that. So that's sort of the you want to call it, the down funnel or post purchase side of the tool. That's where the sort of asset management, I think

Unknown Speaker  16:15  
interesting. We'll be back

Alex Husner  16:16  
in just a minute, but first a word from our premier brand sponsor

Alex Husner  18:00  
ready to take your operations to the next level. Get a free market assessment, a $400 value that gives you a clear picture of how your business stacks up against the competition. You'll meet one on one with a track expert who will evaluate your performance in the context of your market, uncover gaps and opportunities and deliver three to five actionable insights tailored to your business. This is your chance to find out what's working, what's not, and where you can improve based on real market data. Click the link in the description to get started today. So

Annie Holcombe  18:27  
you mentioned Zillow, and I always struggle, because I don't know, in my market, I live in Florida, real estate agents are always trying to sell our house. So I can get you top dollar, whatever, but I'll get the Zillow and then I'll get like, realtor, or I'll get another one. There's another, something out there that send you like a a market data analysis that says this is how much your home is worth. And it feels like some some weeks, those reports are they're so far apart. So I'm curious, do you know? I mean, like, so if you're using something like Zillow, they're using, I don't know what they're using, because their their numbers seem to swing so so drastically. What are you using a Zillow and, like, a key data and then, like, derive data from the PMs, so it kind of like averages that out. Or, how does this all work? This is where I'm lost.

Paul Kromidas  19:15  
It'd be easy if I had it up. Zillow is an example of what an input would be for a home that's for sale. For example, okay, we're not actually pulling any data from sale. Okay, gotcha. Okay, mostly from the MLS. We also don't work together with key data. I would say they do some of the same things we're trying to do, but a little bit differently, and vice versa. But I can tell you that, you know the pre purchase side of the tool, again, I said the pre purchase, the pre go live side of the tool you know that lets you underwrite any property nationally and analyze any property nationally is going to be third party data, right? So it's third party data, scrape data. How we make sure that is the best data set is by pairing it with anonymized first party data coming from the Go Live portion of the tool. So you. Anonymized first party data for our partners in certain markets. We go out and we say, Look, you know, there's 5000 properties in, I don't know, Arizona that were, or Scottsdale that were, you know, on our on our product, we'll anonymize the data, and it lets us compare that to the third party data in that market and identify potential inaccuracies and discrepancies, right? Because we know that a lot of our partners don't want their data surfaced directly to anyone out in the top of funnel section of the tool, the the first party side of the third party side of the tool, so that really lets us clean that data make sure it's really accurate, surface any inaccuracies while still preserving the integrity of our partners down funnel that that makes sense. Gotcha.

Alex Husner  20:46  
What is it? What's your plan to grow this? I mean, are you, I know you said you're not competitive with the pmss and you're integrated with them, but are you trying to grow through more like partnerships, or is it going to be organic, going to directly to the managers? What does that look like? I

Paul Kromidas  21:01  
think it's, it's all of the above right now, you know, we're, we're early. We've had some nice success here. I think, you know, looking at what's gone well for other folks in the space, which seems to be a mix of both of those, right? I'm realizing, I think, how important the partnerships are in this space. You know, a lot of folks that do other segments the end workflow, let's say for a property manager or someone who's owning and operating a property naturally. You know, if we can help share customers, if we can have more success together, we've, we've already structured a few partnerships. I can't announce them just yet, because they're, they're not fully signed, but very, very soon, I've got a couple of my impacts right now, so I think some exciting things. But yes, I do think that partnerships, organic growth, are two of the big ones. And then, you know, didn't, didn't always go to all of them as owner operator myself. But I mean, we've had a lot of success at some of the conferences in the space. I know there's a bunch on the calendar that many folks look forward to. So you can find us in many of those. We'll be we'll be there with our RM booth.

Annie Holcombe  22:05  
Yeah, great. We'll be at VR nation and then exact exec conference, and we be attending any of the ones this coming spring, or we'll be later this fall.

Paul Kromidas  22:14  
We'll be there at VR nation, so see you both. Okay, perfect,

Annie Holcombe  22:17  
great, great. So what does it look like you you mentioned that this is you're not competing with PMS, so this is like an add on service. Is this another platform that they have to log into, or is it connected to their PMS? So it's sort of attached as

Paul Kromidas  22:32  
connected to the PMs Go Live Once you've signed up. It's very easy actually, to just input your MS. Have different terminology but your token or your key, they use it somewhat interchangeably, most of them, but once we're set up and integrated with the PMs, just put your token or your key right there, and it populates all the data, and you can go from there. So yeah, I view it as a and I think a lot of our PMS partners, once they take a look at it, are pretty excited about it, because I think they view it as a deeper data layer than honestly, they're going to spend a bunch of time creating and building themselves. They've got their own products. They've got their own customers. They need to make happy on some of that stuff. And if there's something that's augmented to what they're providing and non competitive, that's at least the response I've gotten thus far seems to be, this is great. This can provide even further insights to our owners and operators. And I think, you know, two of the real KPIs I talked to when, when it comes to this, for them, are really around performance of, you know, their units and retention on side. So, you know, I think we can do enough to keep you performing well, making sure we talk about being proactive and not making managers proactive and not reactive. You know, we want to make sure you don't end up in the ditch before you get pretty so much your performance in this space is, it's like, retroactive Whack a Mole. You're like, yeah.

Alex Husner  24:01  
Second person I've heard use that word, and the other one is Annie. So,

Paul Kromidas  24:05  
I mean, like, when we were owning and operating again, that's where this came from, is, like, I our former revenue manager, like, I get a weekly calls for, like, the business KPIs, and we go through the different properties, and I'm sitting there like, Hey, why are we, why are we down this month in this property of what's going on, then you've got to it's always after the fact. It's like, okay, we had a bad month. It's not like, okay, we're we should expect to have a bad month. Or, yeah, things are happening that are going to lead to a bad month next month that might well,

Annie Holcombe  24:34  
nobody wants to admit that up front. You don't want to say you're going to be bad because you jinx it. You put it on the universe, and it ends up happening. No, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, there are certain

Paul Kromidas  24:43  
things that you can do, to try to do, yeah, right, of course, right before you got there.

Annie Holcombe  24:48  
And I, and maybe I'm confused, so is this, is this like competition to a, a wheelhouse, a beyond pricing? Is it a? Is it a. This is like a sidecar to it, like, I'm confused about how this all works together.

Paul Kromidas  25:04  
Yeah, this is the tricky part about pitching this business to folks, because I think there are other there are other businesses in other segments of real estate that do what we do. But it's, it's both an opportunity and a little bit difficult, because I think it's somewhat net new the space. You know, we're not doing exactly what anyone else is doing, but we're doing pieces of what some folks are doing, and bringing it together in a different way. So I had a customer last week say to me, no, you're, you're, you're a little bit of, like the pricing tools, like, you've got a little bit of like the beyond the wheelhouse and the price labs going on. You know, we're not a pricing tool. I'm just gonna make that clear, like you're gonna have to go take action in your pricing tool. We are talking to those folks about partnerships. So, you know, you're not, we're not a pricing tool, but some of them have started to give insights. We obviously, I think, give a lot of insights, and try to give you a lot of insights into performance and expected performance. And, you know, that's, I think, importantly in a differentiator, it's, yes, it's pricing sometimes that can impact performance, but it's not always pricing, right? There's a lot of qualitative attributes as well that play a role in performance of the listing, and I think we try to lean into that as well to create more of a 360 view on why a listing is performing versus not performing, not just pricing. Because I think that's an important call out when you're talking about us in the space. And then space. And then separately, we're not exactly key data. I think key data does a great job of bringing a lot of data to the surface and a nice dashboard. I think they've started doing competitive sets, and we obviously do a lot of competitive sets, but they're not doing any underwriting. They're not really diving into like, a full real estate level P and L on the home. They're not doing anything that lets you understand, you know, Annie, if you have a home and you want to add a pool, and you know that pool is going to cost you x, and what's the payback period going to be on that? And will the rental return justify that if you finance the cost of that pool at a certain amount, right? Like, there's a lot that goes into it that also isn't covered by that. So I think one of our customers was like, Yeah, you're kind of this, and you're kind of that, but you're this, and you're kind of that, but you're stitching in a way that that is different than either of those two things. So, and I think, you know, internally at the bigger organizations that we've we've made sales with and gotten customers from, seems to be a lot of the sales use case, top of funnel, right? Like, I want to be able to turn around a very quick and very accurate revenue projection to potential owners who are shopping us as a manager, or if I'm an independent if I'm owning myself, I want to be able to analyze a bunch of properties and then a revenue management use case of this is helping me be better at my job On a weekly basis.

Alex Husner  27:41  
Yeah, yeah. You know who comes to mind, actually, is Mark Lumpkin that we've had on the show before that he has SDR cribs, and they do really over the top type upgrades to properties. And I feel like, you know, working what, what you're doing would be complimentary to what they do, right? Like, they actually execute on these, like, big ideas to put into a house, but like having that data, to be able to back it up, if not just saying, okay, it seems like all the houses and, you know, Orlando or in Myrtle Beach or whatever are booking because of this one thing, but being able to have access to that, you know, to really be confident in the decision that you're about to make, I

Paul Kromidas  28:15  
know, Mark, it's you're right. I think we weren't. We weren't uh, making as many pickleball courts, and, you know, basketball they've got going on at some of their properties. You know, it was a similar use case. Like, we'd have people coming to us saying, hey, I want to buy this property we had. Like, I said, we have to underwrite to that. And then it's like, you know, yeah, it's, what would it do if we added a pool? Okay, well, it's going to cost us this much. Here's what we can pay on interest. And, right, right. Like, is that going to make sense or not? And it sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it doesn't,

Annie Holcombe  28:44  
yeah. And I had a conversation with what actually it was Mark and somebody else who were talking about the Panama City Beach market, and they were and they showed a house, and they were like, they're going to do all this stuff. And I was like, I knew exactly where that house is located. I was like, I just don't see how that's going to return. They're like, it's on the beach. I'm like, technically, it's in the city of the beach, but it's not near the beach. It's like, it's, it's never going to generate enough revenue in order for it to do that well. And knowing where it's located, you put a pickleball court these the neighbors on the other side are going to break their guns out and be really unhappy about this. Like, it's just it could, you know? And so I think, like, sometimes it's like, just having the numbers is great, but also I think you need to have a good view of it. So having the manager be able to say, like, I have the numbers and I have the market information, that's really helpful. But I had a question about, you know, people are looking to do these. Do you have a financial arm, or access to finances to help people when they want to do these things,

Paul Kromidas  29:39  
on the lending side, if they're looking Yeah, yeah, we do partner with a few folks, or the some of the partnerships that are in the works, I should say, gotcha, and just Yeah, but yes, we are obviously, you know, we have folks partnerships down funnel with the PMS is, we have other partnerships, but as you're sort of working through it, you know. It's a natural evolution of, okay, I've identified a property with you all, and it looks great. This is what it's going to return at. And you know, these projections can be used to get in front of a lender potentially. Well, you know, do you have any lenders who do DSCR loans or who would be interested in funding something like this? So yes, we do have a few folks that we're partnering with on that end. So stay tuned. Stay tuned for more there.

Annie Holcombe  30:19  
Yeah, well, exciting. You come back on, Alex and Annie and do the do a big announcement with us?

Paul Kromidas  32:46  
Yeah, there are definitely a lot. This is, everyone loves this question. It's like, you know, what happens in the four walls? Yeah, I try to think what I can say that get me in trouble. You know, I think I was there pre covid, and through the initial parts of covid, you know, I think two things come to mind. One did, one is, one is maybe less juicy. I'll start with the less juicy one. It really taught me how resilient this space is, because I was there in March of 2020, and you see the bookings dashboard just go off a cliff, right? I've never liked it. You're, you're, you know, business, massive business, you know, at that time, if you remember, Airbnb, you know, had an IPO readiness mandate heading into that year, because we were gearing up for an IPO at the time, and I came in too late to make a I'm still working in the space. Let's put it that way. There's some people I know who retired off their Airbnb shares and whatnot. I wasn't there early enough for that, but, you know, there were certainly some people in those halls that were wondering if their retirement had just evaporated when that happened, which is, which is crazy to see live. I've never seen anything, and then within 30 days, it's right back up. And, you know, it changed, and you realize how much the space ebbs and flows it became. It went from urban, short term stays in, you know, the Saunder like hotel type environments that were very popular if you recall at the time, to, you know, rural, long term stays three weeks plus like were blowing up at the time. You couldn't find any inventory. And it showed me just how resilient this space really is. It'll snap back and bounce back. But as a manager or an owner and operator, you have to keep those things in mind. And it taught all of us that if you want to create a portfolio that's resilient through any economic cycles, yeah, maybe spread your geographies out so you're not concentrated in one place. If you can afford to do that, maybe pick something that has a mountain and a beach aspect to it. Maybe pick something that's has urban and rural. The sooner you can get to that differentiation, the better on a portfolio level, just to solidify what you're doing and then. Yeah, but I think that was one big lesson. I think, you know, maybe something juicy Airbnb has, has no shortage of ideas and thoughts about where they want to go in the space in general. And I think one thing that people always get confused is Airbnb does not consider themselves to be an OTA, right? I think, you know, anyone in the space would say, oh, it's booking, it's verbo, it's Airbnb, right? Like Airbnb thinks of themselves as something more than an OTA. Whether that's true or not, is not not my place to judge, but you know, that's why they invest in things like the the icons launch, folks may have caught, like, you know, get a dinner with Kevin Hart or whatever, play basketball with LeBron. I am trying to remember some of them that they had, but like, you know, booking and verbal aren't going to do that because they're, they're thinking of themselves in OTA. And I think Airbnb is always trying to push the limits of what they're trying to do, and what that means. And you can naturally assume where they've wanted to go in the past, or at least thought of going in the past. I can, I can tell you that there was a time and I'm not sure if they still think this way, but there's a time when Brian used to say, I want Airbnb to be everything from the time you think about a trip until the time you come home from that trip. So you can imagine all the steps that you may take back from somewhere, or what you're doing in that place, right? Yeah, that they could or could not have been considering going into or delved into in the past. So I think I learned to never, never put them in a box and think they're just going to do the obvious thing that everyone thinks they're going to do, because nine times they're thinking something

Alex Husner  36:39  
different. And I think because of that, I mean, you know, directly and indirectly, that has been why the trajectory of Airbnb is, is the way that it is. I mean, they always looked at themselves as something bigger than what they what they are, what they were, which I think is a great just lesson. And, you know, business mindset for any company would be thinking about of like, you know, think, always think bigger. And I mean, your brand is everything like they've invested so much in their brand that, you know, they, you know, I'm sure, if you look at it, they're probably, comparatively still spending about the same, or, you know, pretty close to what booking and Expedia spend on paid search. But you know, they don't necessarily have to to that extent that the other OTAs do, because they really have built a brand that they're just top of mind, that they are associated with the product of vacation rentals. So it's, it's interesting to watch. And I think what you said makes, makes sense. I mean, I'm, I would love to have been on some of the brainstorming meetings of like, if you know, what could we possibly do? I mean, literally, when money is no issue, the list can get pretty long.

Paul Kromidas  37:45  
What else I learned, though, and money is no issue, there's, there can be a lot of wasted money too, and a lot of, yeah, what could possibly like, you know, you some, there's something. And I think, you know, to their credit, they learned this when covid happened, when you're potentially faced with losing everything all of a sudden, you get really down to brass tacks. And yeah, reality is and focus in into Brian's credit. He fundraised immediately. He focused in on the core business. He dropped all the side frills and what it could be, locked in on what it what it needs to be right now. And I think that that that solidified their position more than anything, but to take, to take it back to a comment you just had that, I think is, is spot on. You know, the brand side, it's, it's one of my biggest lessons from being there is, and I think when people, someone, compliment someone and say they're a great storyteller, or they're a great salesperson, it's taken as like a negative sometimes. I think Brian is an exceptional storyteller and an exceptional for sure, everyone who works there, I can tell you right now, everyone who works there totally drinks the Kool Aid in the best way possible. I drank the Kool Aid like you are ready to run through walls for that company, even if you know you don't know them personally that well. And they learned that lesson with the marketing side. When covid happened, too. I remember the first thing to get pause was all paid advertising naturally, because before you cut people, you want to pause that, and that was part of the reasoning for why they lean into the things like icons. Icons is essentially a marketing spend. It's not driving bottom line like, how much is the dinner with Kevin Hart driving to the revenue? Yeah, much, but that's a marketing play. Instead of paying Google, and Brian will say this, he realized he didn't have to pay Google because the brand they built was so strong. People were just going to show up on Airbnb.

Alex Husner  39:35  
They're gonna know it anyways. Yeah, I'd stand on it. So very smart.

Annie Holcombe  39:39  
Yeah, definitely a case study and how to do everything, right? But I'm sure there was a lot of failures behind the scenes that nobody got to see for sure. Yeah,

Paul Kromidas  39:49  
it's, I mean, look, whether it's there or or here, or any I've seen other people launch and get going. You know, you don't, I don't think anyone. Becomes an entrepreneur because it's easy they need to do. I have a lot of respect for anyone who tries to start any business, because it's not easy, right? You're trying to create something with your bare hands. And you know, even there they had, it's funny to say now, but they were rejected from Y Combinator initially, right? That's one of the things, yeah, yeah, Silicon Valley, and people will sit there about how great a business is that passed on them multiple times. They had to beg people for money in the beginning, right? So, like, people thought it was a crazy idea. There's so much of this that comes down to just grit and perseverance and just kind of not dying, so to speak. Yeah, yeah.

Annie Holcombe  40:35  
Some people are born with that, like drive to know that if they have an idea they have to see it through instead of just giving up. Because he could have given up multiple times for sure.

Paul Kromidas  40:46  
I mean, I not to pat myself, but, you know, we had a, I wouldn't say we were close to death, but, you know, I think we were people who've talked to me now, who reached out and said, You know, I, I probably would have just thrown in the towel if I, if I felt like the first business wasn't going to be, you know, fundable business, you know, down the line, or a business that was going to be $100 million business, or something else, and just go ahead and throw in the towel and move on to something else. But, you know, I think when you've got a passion for building, when you've got a passion for you, when you when you see an opportunity and you feel like whatever space you're in needs something, I think it's a powerful thing. And I think getting getting buy in from other people, just like I said before, Brian, it's again, whether you're doing this locally as a property manager, whether you're running your own cleaning service like there's there's a ton of applicability to starting businesses across the

Alex Husner  41:43  
board. Sure. Yeah, yeah. Well, super interesting is, you know, we're always amazed by how many just brilliant people have come into the industry. And certainly in the last, you know, several years since covid, it's just, it's expanded. But really interesting to see, you know, a business model, even like what you've got, Paul that, you know, going back 10 years ago, nobody was thinking about having something like this. I mean, they needed this information, but, you know, it's the sharp individuals that really saw the opportunity, and then was like, I'm going to figure this out, because people are sick and tired of using spreadsheets, right? And how can they figure out all this information in one place? So, yeah, so Well, we're excited to see you this year at all the shows. If there's any, any way that you'd like our audience to reach out to you. What's the best way for them to get in touch?

Paul Kromidas  42:33  
Yeah, you can check us out@www.summeros.com reach out to me personally. My email is paul@summerhouse.com we have a great, you know, sales team happy to take you through it live, you know, share more, and we can connect with your PMS as well and get you going on a free trial. So

Alex Husner  42:49  
yeah, love that cool. Well, if anybody wants to get in touch with Annie and I, you can go to Alex and Annie podcast.com and until next time, thanks for tuning in, everybody. You