Buying for Brand (Then Growing 4x)

If you're thinking about it from the, from the perspective of brand, it gives your customer even more reason to engage with you because if they are staying with you with greater frequency, maybe they're staying two or three or four times in a year for weekend stays, which is how now we message out our message around our business and how we've built the business, they want to engage with you more…

That's such an interesting point. So in a short term rental market where it's much more weekend stays versus a ski town where it's mostly winter, maybe some summer, or a beach town where it's mostly just summer, while the revenue might look similar, the touch points are so much fewer. People are only interacting once, maybe twice a year.

If I rent a house for a week during my, you know, during my vacation and that's my one time a year, you know, interaction with the brand or with the company that I'm renting from, I have very little reason to engage with them outside of that stay. What we have been able to do is turn that high, repeat, you know, frequency of guest into a more direct connection with the brand, with the platform…

And ultimately, you know, show them that, that the Red Cottage platform that we have is, has the best homes, has the, you know, has the best properties, and they should come to us first rather than go to an Airbnb or a verbo or a booking.com so that they.

Oh, I see. So you're actually eventually hoping that people come to redcottage.com as opposed to even going to Airbnb.

Yeah, they do. We do almost two thirds of our business direct through red cottage.com. i think the biggest compliment that anyone can give us is when they go to our site and they say, I thought you were a channel. I didn't realize that you were actually a management company.

Because what we've built is so consumer facing in how we position ourselves. We almost do zero, like outbound solicitation for new homeowners. And everything we do is to speak to the guests.

And ultimately what we found and what we believe is that that will organically bring homeowners to us because they will say, well, my home should be on this site. My home is as nice as any of these homes in this area. And they are, you know, clearly the largest manager within this space in this area.

And that that's proven true. I mean, we have in a, an incredibly healthy pipeline of homes that have come to us organically, I think, because of the quality of the site, because of the quality of the brand.

So let's return to the plot here, Matt. So the owner was talking to two other buyers, big institutional buyers or national brands. And your pitch was they just want to buy your portfolio.

They're going to get rid of your brand and bring it under their house brand. I, individual buyer, believe in brand, believe in the brand you've built. So it's not just about the portfolio for me, it's about building your brand. And that was the pitch that convinced.