You’ve probably heard it said that there’s never any reward without a little bit of risk. And while the short-term rental industry does present uncertainties, as it involves constantly entrusting strangers with your properties, there are advanced property tech security solutions on the market that can significantly reduce your vulnerability, helping to pave a risk-free road to that reward.
In our latest webinar led by Guesty’s Shelbi Lifshitz, Autohost Co-Founder and CEO Anton Zilberberg walks us through the process of scaling your security process so you can protect and expand your short-term rental business.
Anton reveals the most prominent security threats facing short-term property management companies, shares some eye-opening horror stories and divulges the best tactics for proactively arming yourself against risk.
Rounding off the webinar, Shelbi explains how the Guesty-Autohost partnership positions mutual users to not only protect what they have, but safely grow their assets and take their short-term or vacation rental businesses to the next level.
As always, we invited those tuning in to contribute questions throughout the webinar, which we then addressed in a Q&A session following the presentation. Here are some highlights:
Q&A Session
Q: How does Autohost differentiate a “good guest” from a “bad guest”?
Autohost does behavioral analysis, which involves taking a bunch of characteristics of risky reservations, ranking those characteristics based on score and then assigning a score to each guest that sends a booking inquiry. The platform mimics the decision-making process of a property manager, flagging the same risk indications that you would, if you weren’t processing multiple reservations at once and had the time to do so. Risk assessment is also based on the collection of various documents and contact details and a thorough verification process of everything provided.
Q: How does Guesty facilitate pricing automation?
Guesty offers integrations with 4 different dynamic pricing tools, which provide data-based and algorithmic management of your rates.
On the other hand, within Guesty we have our own Yield Management, which is not market-data based or algorithmic, but automatically implements rules entirely based on your insights. A property management company that’s in a niche area and has been there for years might have better insight and better knowledge than a third-party dynamic pricing tool would, whereas a new business that hasn’t yet gotten their bearings or is in a new area might opt to go the market-data or dynamic pricing route.
Q: How do you go about cancelling “bad guests”?
Once you’ve determined a guest does not fit your requirements for hosting, you need to clarify your expectations to them and let them know why you are declining them or offer them the choice to either explicitly accept your house rules or cancel their request. In most cases, legitimate guests will cancel on their own. In the event of a suspected fraudulent reservation, Autohost has had no issue with reporting the situation to the OTA.
Q: Does Autohost run background checks?
Although Autohost does run background checks, these alone should not determine whether property managers should decline or accept a reservation. There are many other factors that should be considered and these are details Autohost takes into account.
Zahava has been writing for Guesty since March of 2017. She's enjoying learning all there is to know about short-term property management and relaying solutions to Guesty's readers, helping to make the demanding jobs of property managers just a little bit simpler.
