Produced by VRMB. Sponsored by Track Hospitality Software.

Ep. 1: The Wake-up Call 2 Ep. 2: Journey into Advocacy 23 Ep. 3: Go Together 39 Ep. 4: The Big Day 57 Ep. 5: Money 75 Ep. 6: We Need to Talk 89 Ep. 7: Telling Your Story 109 Ep. 8: When It All Goes Wrong 122 Ep. 9: Big Ideas 143 Ep. 10: Where Do We Go From Here 161

Ep. 1: The Wake-up Call

Eric Bay (ANP) Things got out of hand and city council members ran on ​ platforms that said we want to rein this in and stop this. Unfortunately, what they did was take several draconian measures and backward steps in eliminating about 70% of all of the formerly licensed and legal properties in New Orleans.

Megan McCrea (NASTRA) The city was basically trying to pass a ban on short ​ term rentals. And even those of us who were in operation would have to stop.

Phil Minardi (Expedia) Right now in the US, we have over 4200 municipalities, I ​ would say, decent guests is that at least half of them at this point, have either had the conversation about regulations or are currently having them right now.

Paige Teel (NEVRP) We are trying to figure out exactly how we want to be ​ defined, which has always been something that's been hard for us because we've we're not gonna say flown under the radar, but we've also not been regulated. So there's kind of a two edged sword to that, especially now due to the Coronavirus.

David Krauss (Rent Responsibly) You need to be extremely aware of the fact ​ that a good actor can have a really bad day and be that story and city hall.

Jessica Black (Moms Against Short Term Rentals) Unless you work with the ​ community to figure out how it makes sense. The battle is not gonna end

Jonah Mechanic (Seabreeze VR San Diego) I don't think there's gonna be a ​ tourist destination in the entire US that by the year 2022 won't have some kind of a short term rental ordinance in place.

Dana Lubner From my friends at VRMB communities. This is "How to Save Your ​ Vacation Rental Business," a 10 part educational series about the do's and don'ts of sustainable short term rentals. This episode is brought to you by Track powered by Travel Net Solutions providing integrated solutions to transform the way vacation rental hospitality works. I'm Dana Lubner and this episode is our wake up call. In this episode, we learn why inaction, complacency, and unwillingness to band together in the face of regulations are the greatest threat to our industry. Community-based advocacy has to be done. It's hard, but it works. And it never stops.

Dana Lubner Hello, everyone and welcome to my show. I'm so excited to share ​ everything we've learned from some of the most courageous players in the industry.

Matt Landau Hi, Dana. ​

Dana Lubner Good morning, Matt. ​

Matt Landau How are you? ​

Dana Lubner I'm doing great. How are you? It's so good to hear your voice. ​

Matt Landau It's good to hear your voice. I'm doing well. I'm especially excited ​ because this is the first episode of our podcast together. Are you stoked?

Dana Lubner I am beyond stoked to be doing this. That's my colleague Matt Landau, ​ from VRMB. I've followed VRMB for a few years now and love the community and how it connects us all at a global level. Matt and I decided to team up to tackle this topic because hope is not a strategy. And this is the biggest threat to our future. I'll lean on him throughout this episode and at certain times throughout the rest of the season.

Matt Landau So what are we here to talk about today? What is this podcast all ​ about anyway?

Dana Lubner This podcast is all about advocacy, ​

Matt Landau Or should we say this is not about advocacy at all? Dun Dun Dun... ​

Dana Lubner It's bigger than advocacy, but it is related and something that has been ​ near and dear to my heart for the last few years.

Matt Landau The word advocacy we like to joke about it, but it's kind of a boring ​ word, right? You hear it and you don't really get excited to listen or do anything.

Dana Lubner The word and turn people off whether it's just not something that's ​ exciting or they're intimidated by it.

Matt Landau Over the course of our interviews over the last few months. Have ​ you come up with a replacement for advocacy? What is this podcast about if it's not about advocacy?

Dana Lubner The word that I've fallen in love with as a replacement for advocacy is ​ "community." And that's really what we're talking about here is how to build community and sustainability for the industry. Phil Minardi, Director of Policy and communications for Expedia Group, does a great job explaining this intersection of community and advocacy.

Phil Minardi (Expedia) I would say advocacy is more than policy work. One of ​ the challenges for local alliances is to stay together after a campaign is done. And, Dana, I know you understand this acutely after the shared goal of policy solutions is behind them. A lot of groups get back to regular order, they go back to the important work of putting heads in beds and welcoming folks to their communities. So the local Alliance, the local group, the local engagement falls by the wayside. The truth is, we have an incredible opportunity to position ourselves as community leaders, not just vacation rental operators.

Dana Lubner Phil's my go to guy because he's the one that actually shows up, rolls up ​ his sleeves and genuinely asks how he can help and be of service. Matt, what do you think of community?

Matt Landau I've always really liked community. But I've also come up with my ​ own replacement, and that is "readiness." I've been looking into the world of disaster preparedness, preparing for whether it's a natural disaster, or even something like if you go off hiking in the woods with 16 friends, you need to have some preparedness there some readiness, whether it's a compass, or telephone, or a first-aid kit. And what we've been learning is that a disaster will strike any given vacation rental destination, if it hasn't already, likely will sometime soon, you got to be ready.

Jonah Mechanic (Seabreeze VR San Diego) To be honest, we're, we're in the ​ reactive group, as much as I said, it would be great for more people to be thinking proactively, you know, we we're guilty of being reactive as well. So we're kind of right now just fighting the fight and doing whatever we can do to keep our heads above water and keep a band from coming down.

Dana Lubner That was Jonah Mechanic in San Diego, proving that even the best ​ operators in the industry struggle with these issues every day. So no matter what we call it, whether it's advocacy, or community or readiness, we're talking about the same thing here. The basis of this is all about creating sustainability for your business.

Matt Landau Yeah. Do you want to continue running your business profitably in ​ the future? If the answer is yes, this is the podcast for you.

Matt Landau So Dana, I want to take a moment to heap some praise on you, ​ would you mind,

Dana Lubner I'm totally flattered. ​

Matt Landau It's a nice way to start off the podcast season. For those who don't ​ know, Dana, she sort of came on to our radar over the last few years with her amazing community leadership work in Denver, Colorado, your Mile High Hosts group is how old now, Dana?

Dana Lubner Our group started in the Spring of 2019. ​

Matt Landau And you are going through this advocacy or community leadership ​ process yourself, you're actively figuring out how to do things with no guidebook or instruction manual. And we thought it would be a great idea to help you do that by introducing you to people who are actively doing it well, but also to document your process to kind of archive it so that other vacation rental professionals can follow along. What's your big kind of goal for the episodes of this podcast for our listeners?

Dana Lubner I want to make advocacy and community efforts approachable for ​ everyone. I don't want it to be something that turns them off when they hear the word or they think that they don't have any experience with policy and they can't get into it. I want this to be a practical how to so everyone feels empowered to step up and do their part.

Matt Landau Yeah, I like that. And I particularly like your obsession with ​ actionable tips. There are so many interviews that we'll be featuring this season where you really just sink your teeth into a topic and ask the expert to explain it on a granular level, how they did it. And that's really what people want to hear. At least that's what you as a leader of an advocacy group in Denver would find useful, right?

Dana Lubner It's Great to hear about everything that people have accomplished. But if ​ you don't understand the step by step how to get there, it's easy to do nothing. Instead,

Matt Landau We came up with the very original, very concise and creative title, ​ "How to Save Your Vacation Rental Business," right? We spent some time brainstorming now had some good ideas thrown into the mix?

Dana Lubner I think we went back and forth for at least a month. ​

Matt Landau Until I started to feel myself getting slightly less intelligent with ​ every proposal. But then again, I'm not known to be great at naming things. And in the end, we settled on "how to save your vacation rental business," because that's what people are being forced to do.

Dana Lubner If you don't start sharing the readiness of your local community, you may ​ find yourself in a position where you don't have a vacation rental business to run anymore.

Eric Bay (ANP) Most of those homes and the Treme that you walk by on the way ​ to some coffee shops and things like that have all had their license non-renewed, and their individual business model decimated.

Dana Lubner That was Eric Bay of ANP in New Orleans, sharing how even when you ​ think you're doing everything right, you can't let your guard down.

Eric Bay (ANP) You know, these were families in Treme, I'm thinking of ​ someone who lives in that in that neighborhood who is 77 years old, born and raised Creole, Creole new, New Orleanian accumulated limited wealth over the course of their life and renovated beautiful properties in in our post-Katrina devastated city, and brought them back to perfection, invested blood, sweat, equity, and open them up to to visiting tourists. They advocated to get licensed and legal and taxes and remit additional funding to affordable housing groups. We've brought in over $6 million at $1 per night into a usable funding for affordable housing advocacy. And those people worked in and spent their entire investment savings and were made legal. And we're enjoying exactly what we wanted to do. We wanted to share our city, but we wanted to do so responsibly. And then that was made illegal at that point, the only ones that were benefiting were the one half of a unit or the the unit in a condo building.

Dana Lubner This reminds me of what it felt like a Denver at the beginning when ​ regulations were defined. But a year later we found hosts being reported on as to what they were doing was criminal activity.

Matt Landau Yeah, your personal story, Dana really struck me. And over the ​ course of the interviews, another thing I've realized is people often use this. Maslow's hierarchy, both for an individual, but also for a small business -- for a vacation rental business, for instance, the foundational layer of that pyramid is the home itself, the property. And then you've got some kind of income. And then eventually you have purpose or fulfillment that you want out of your business. But what I've realized my big epiphany throughout this learning process is that there's actually an entirely hidden bottom layer, about all of our businesses that we don't really think about so much. And it's regulations. It's how our vacation rentals are defined and regulated in any given destination. And if we're not addressing this bottom, most primordial layer of our health, it can all just be pulled right out from underneath us. No?

Dana Lubner I couldn't agree more. And the reality is, even if you've been doing ​ advocacy work and you have fair regulations, there's no guarantee that that couldn't change. And so it is something that you consistently have to have eyes on and pay attention to.

Matt Landau This podcast is not just a feel good thing that you should be ​ thinking about. This is directly correlated with people's bottom lines.

Phil Minardi (Expedia) To see the long term growth in our industry, and frankly ​ are businesses, we do need to get involved in community efforts beyond regulations. So for a lot of local alliances, that means transitioning from spending every meeting talking about who's connecting with what city council member to having regular meetings to talk about startup coaching, to transitioning to engaging in community service efforts to having a focus not just on advocacy, best practices, but transitioning to meetings focused on business best practices. So I think that the one thing that I think we should be focusing on, especially as we come out of COVID-19, is recognizing that advocacy, that alliances, that our community has more in common than just a shared policy goal. And to the extent that we can focus our attention on being true leaders within our community, I

think that's going to go a long distance to inoculating our industry, from negative policies that may come down the pipeline in the future.

Matt Landau The way that I've been explaining this to folks, the more that I've been ​ learning, is by simply asking them a question, do you want to run a profitable business? Several years into the future? And if the answer that question is, yes, you need to begin thinking about these things right now.

Dana Lubner The big takeaway from these voices across the vacation rental ​ industry is that this has to be done. In Episode 2, will be looking into how I and several others got into advocacy and provide you with a roadmap for your local community. And Episode 3 will go into the fundamentals of building a local Alliance group. In Episodes 4 and 5, we'll be learning how to throw an event that highlights your positive community interaction, and how to pay for all of this. Later, we'll find out what happens when things go wrong, and what to do about it.

Matt Landau Dana, we've known advocacy/not-advocacy is important. We've known ​ that now for some time. But I feel like now, it's more important than ever before with the adversity as a result of the pandemic.

Dana Lubner I think a pandemic gave a platform for those that are in opposition ​ to the industry to really amplify their voice and their reasons and their concerns about how the industry is operating. I mean, we've seen this now with the professionals that we've spoken to in locations all around the country that this isn't an isolated battle that's happening, this is happening with our friends in Nashville. And you know, it continues to happen in San Diego where there's a lot at stake there right now, where, you know, platforms are getting involved and hosts are really having to adjust to the way that they have built their livelihoods and created revenue streams.

Matt Landau Yeah, there's like hotel groups that are looking to take advantage of the ​ chaos. I'm looking to almost just close the door and solder it shut. When no one else is looking, by kind of deeming short term rentals as non primary accommodation options, while hotels remain open, which to me just sounds crazy.

Dana Lubner It makes no sense to anybody that understands the industry and ​ the amenities that a vacation rental offers and in a time of a pandemic, that a hotel would be labeled as the essential lodging accommodation over a short term rental. It's mind blowing. Jennifer Frankenstein-Harris of New Smyrna Beach, Florida went through this process of being listed as non essential and managed to turn it around.

Jennifer Frankenstein-Harris Well, I don't think anything is isolated to New ​ Smyrna Beach. I mean, I've been watching these things go on for the past four months that we've been dealing with COVID-19 in different counties, across the state. So I don't know. You know, I think a lot of people are just scared. You know, I don't know why some of the things that have been happening are happening. I can only relate it back to fear. And when you're not knowledgeable, and you don't know (like, we don't know enough about this virus) then you act out of fear. So one of the things that we saw across the state was condo association boards, and homeowners association boards. And these are boards of volunteer people. Just so everybody understands what a COA or an HOA board is. They've made decisions that completely take away the property rights of the people who own in that building or own in that community. They have made decisions saying, "You can't come to your home." If you're not a primary resident, you can't come to your home? Like this happened in the Outer Banks right to close the bridge. If they didn't care if you own the house. They're not you couldn't go to your private property. I've had condo associations say, "Hey, we're not going to let any renters (we don't even use the word renters. I mean, their guests) we're not going to allow any guests to come to our condo." Now, if you own there or live there, that's fine. But they're not going to let a renter come. Well, most of my owners rely on the rental revenue to pay their mortgage and their taxes in their maintenance fees. And I've had other other condo complexes when Governor DeSantis came out with his first executive order to stop vacation rentals. Mind you hotels never closed hotels were open hotels and resorts in the state of Florida timeshares, in the state of Florida all open, just vacation rentals not open. His first executive order said, if you were doing a 30 day rental, you could come nothing shorter than 30 days. Well, I had some condo association boards that thought that was a really good idea. And so they're now going to only have 30 day rentals, because the Governor said it. So now we're going to do that. You can't take away somebody's right to use their property. We've seen just government overreach, whether it's a local government or ordinance or a little volunteer condo board, which, as most people know, it consists of people who live on site don't rent their properties, and they hate "those people" at their

building, even though as a condo owner, you have the same rights. And your guest has the same rights as an owner.

Dana Lubner Wow. So what did you do? What was? What were some of the first steps ​ when you saw that hotels were being deemed as essential and allowed to operate? What does somebody who knows so much better than the nonsense of this decision? What does one do?

Jennifer Frankenstein-Harris I'm telling you it, it was one of the most frustrating ​ experiences because you don't know what to do. Okay, first and foremost. I don't even feel comfortable today encouraging travel, encouraging people to come to our vacation homes, because I feel like maybe I could be doing something wrong, you know, could I be contributing to this spread? I would certainly never want to feel, you know, responsible for that. But people are going to travel. So they are going to go and they should be able to be in a safe arena. Right. So, absolutely vacation homes and condos are much safer than a resort or a hotel with shared spaces. And, you know, there's been enough studies on that even the head of infectious disease at Florida State University, was giving a webinar on COVID-19. And he popped up a graph of the lowest risk activities to the highest risk activities. And actually on this man's graph, it said staying in a vacation home, it was on the low risk line item, staying in a vacation home, staying in a hotel was at medium risk. So even you know, medical experts are saying, hey, you should be staying in a vacation home, it's the lowest risk. So, you know, that's the rationale. I say, "well, I've got to provide this service to people who are going to travel."

Dana Lubner Through her existing community advocacy network and relationships with ​ legislative aides and other officials, Jennifer was able to reclassify vacation rentals and get her business open. If there isn't a community already built when a pandemic hits. There is no united voice to respond or to educate or relationships built with city legislators to have the discussion about the value that a vacation rental really can provide during a time of crisis, and so it becomes more important than ever and more obvious than ever, when you don't have that advocacy community built, when something like this happens.

Dana Lubner Paige Teel in Maine was another example of someone who was living ​ through conflicting messages from officials and was able to defend the value of vacation rentals because of our advocacy group.

Paige Teel (NEVRP) Because we pay taxes because we do everything by the ​ books because we've been following the legislation. We couldn't even accept reservations, we didn't even know if you're going to have, you know, be allowed to have guests come in and that type of scariness. No, is that as a whole other thing, but for her to step up there and just kind of do it as an afterthought, because she only started saying that once we blew down the doors of the commissioner saying, "Hey, don't forget about vacation rentals." And then the next press release, that Governor said, "Oh, and Airbnb types." And so the fact that it's kind of thrown in as an afterthought, but also kind of lumped together with Airbnb, and no shade to Airbnb, but professionally managed vacation rental companies and just vacation rentals period is kind of my biggest thing that verbiage just kind of it felt like it was kind of a dirty type of way to lump us all together. I don't know, I just I just I didn't. It's not who we are, you know, and that's my biggest thing is, Airbnb yes they're rolling out, you know, cleaning procedures, and safety inspections. But that's something that we've been doing right along since the very beginning. Some of these folks have been doing it for 30 years. So I think for a lot of them, they're frustrated to say, you know, can you at least recognize that we've gone above and beyond what the state has required, what our homeowners require, what the fire department requires, what the town, you know, code and law enforcement officer requires. And that's all or the auspice of the vacation rental professionals of Maine. So that's my biggest frustration is to say, you know, we're protecting the public, and the tourism that you know, come into Maine and we should be recognized for that.

Matt Landau I think it's really a time when communities are being forced to step ​ up. And this has to do with the health of your local community, like not throwing gigantic Airbnb parties in the middle of a pandemic, for instance. It has to do with the laws and being good neighbors, it's kind of a chance for the communities to solve their own problems. And if you don't have that kind of infrastructure in place, it's exposed now.

Dana Lubner I think you hit the nail on the head, it is about accountability and the way ​ things have been operating haven't been working, ultimately. And this is truly a chance to be a part of how we want to shape this community moving forwards.

Matt Landau And this is partly a result of just having a new industry, like we are ​ almost by definition, fragmented, and broken up into tons of individual little pieces. This is our biggest weakness. We don't have the kind of unity organization that a more mature industry might. And I think that's what the pandemic for me has exposed is those relationships, like you said, at the very core level, and the hard work that's being put in ahead of time in preparation for a disaster like this. It's either in place already, and you have a chance of surviving, or you have to begin right now. And it's not too late, right?

Dana Lubner It's a matter of evolving or dying. It's, I don't mean to sound so despair ​ there. But we've truly been all marching to the beat of our own drum and operating in different ways that are not united and it becomes so obvious. When there are regulations or you know, crisis is that happen. That caused us to really see how exposed we are when we're not unified with our voice.

Dana Lubner The pandemic is providing the final impossible to ignore wake up call to ​ join advocacy efforts. But the people we're talking to this season, heard the call before all of this began. Let's listen to what Meghan McCrea in Nashville has to say. When I asked her about the moment she first got involved.

Dana Lubner Tell us about the moment of truth when you knew you had to get involved ​ with advocacy, paint a little bit of a picture of what the struggle was, and maybe internally as well as externally.

Megan McCrea (NASTRA) Sure, it was actually. It was a month or two after we ​ had started welcoming guests. Airbnb hosted a meetup here in the community, it was when they were launching co hosts. So it was a while ago. And I met the president of NASTRA at the time there who came and said, "Listen, the city is planning to shut us down." And I just remember, I remember the feeling of like, "What are you talking about?" You know, my heart just sank? I couldn't really wrap my head around why anyone would think this is bad, right?

Megan McCrea (NASTRA) And she passed out information about coming to a ​ meeting. And so I went, my husband and I went, and the stuff I was hearing just, it almost sounded unreal, to the point where I actually did question, "are these people saying, could they be telling us the truth that this is happening?" And then I started doing research. And lo and behold, it was true, the city was basically trying to pass a ban on short term rentals. And even those of us who were in operation would have to stop. And even though it was early, I was already too far into it as far as welcoming guests and just really enjoying it that even though I still had a full time thing, and this was just a hobby, I honestly couldn't imagine what it would be like to not do it anymore. And I started volunteering with the organization and met several other hosts and found out I was not alone in that feeling. And 90% of the hosts were super involved, very engaged in the day to day, really interacting with their guests. Showing them places, I always say "beyond Broadway." And I just thought, we can't have this. And that was when I knew I had to fight just not only for myself and for guests, but for these fellow hosts who felt the same way that I did.

Dana Lubner Amazing. So it sounds like the group, your moment of truth and you got ​ involved. That wasn't when the advocacy groups started the advocacy group NASTRA was already formed at the time?

Megan McCrea (NASTRA) It was and it really didn't even start as an advocacy ​ group. They started it as just a host connection group. But they didn't get too far into that because literally it started and then legislation started happening as well. So they quickly had to pivot and get into the advocacy role.

Dana Lubner Megan is going to be a key voice over the next several episodes and ​ teaching us how to join, organize and motivate a local host organization. I challenge you to begin thinking, What's your wake up call? You may be in the middle of your wake up call right now. It may be a few months from now. Either way, I guarantee you it's going to happen.

Dana Lubner And now a word from our sponsor. Track Hospitality Software is powered ​ by Travel Net Solutions and industry leading hospitality company. Track is a portfolio software designed specifically with your vacation rental management company in mind.

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Dana Lubner Across the nation, as we've seen these regulatory fights develop two key ​ themes of compromise and self enforcement have emerged. Here is Phil describing what victory looks like and the regulatory fight.

Phil Minardi (Expedia) I would say victory is a compromise policy that ​ responsibly regulates our industry in a way that protects good actors and gives them the certainty that they need to invest in their business for the long term, but also one that gives communities the certainty that they need to know that our industry is going to be a positive member of the community. And I think we've seen that in more instances now than we have in the past. And I think the best policies are ones, where we're not going to have to come back and re-litigate them in the next six months in the next year. And we only do that through compromise.

Dana Lubner Here's a perfect example of this in action. Creating a memorandum of ​ understanding with the City of San Diego to finally put an end to years of uncertainty for local vacation rental businesses. Jonah Mechanic of Seabreeze Vacation Rentals spoke to me about the kind of self enforcement that really makes for functional regulations.

Jonah Mechanic (Seabreeze VR San Diego) The end goal is that the short ​ term rental industry funds what's necessary to support this program, which would then fund the code compliance department so they could hire extra officers that was essential in the development of this. And I want to make sure I hit on that because anyone who's listening who's trying to develop an ordinance somewhere else, trust me, you can have the best ordinance in the world. But if there's no funding for enforcement, it is never going to get off the ground, and it's never going to be effective.

Jonah Mechanic (Seabreeze VR San Diego) So by the numbers we have, ​ based on what the current costs are for permits for the MOU, it's going to raise

about $6 million a year, which is which would be bookmarked specifically for code compliance. What that means is that code compliance can hire what are called PISO officers, they are usually retired police officers, they're able to issue citations, they are in uniform, and they do drive police cars, however, they do not carry weapons. So that's the difference between a regular police officer and a PISO officer. Going back to what we talked about, when you're cranky, old neighbor calls to complain about the kids jumping in a pool, and being too loud, she would call a specific number, which would go to the code compliance department, the code compliance department would send a PISO officer out to the property to see if the complaint is legit, or not legit. Certainly, if it's legit, then the PISO officer would alert the guests that they're in violation of a certain ordinance and basically knock it off. If it's not legit, the code, compliance officer would let whoever complained know, basically, you know, knock it off, your boy who cried wolf thing isn't gonna work. And, we know what you're doing, and it's basically not going to work.

Jonah Mechanic (Seabreeze VR San Diego) So that is probably one of the ​ most important aspects of this as well, is to have a neutral party be able to be the judge as to if a short term rental is in violation or not, because we all know that there will be -- I can tell you with 100% certainty -- there will be neighbors who serve who just don't like vacation rentals, and they're going to try and call in every day to try and get complaints logs so that the the owner can lose their permit. So it was very important to us to make sure that a neutral independent party was the one who was going to read the report to the property to determine if it's just a neighbor being an old cranky neighbor, or if it actually is the guest causing an issue.

Dana Lubner The takeaway to remember here from regulatory battles across the ​ country and from recent efforts during the pandemic is that community based advocacy groups work, they often face a long struggle, but they are the only way to help shape the sustainability of your vacation rental business.

Dana Lubner Two of the main players we see in these regulatory battles are OTAs and ​ anti vacation rental groups. OTA stands for online travel agency, think of Airbnb, Vrbo, Expedia Booking.com. In the show, we're going to be talking to both of these groups and from hosts that know how to deal with them in an effort to give you the tools you need to best navigate the landscape. And I spoke with Phil on how hosts can take advantage of OTA involvement.

Phil Minardi (Expedia) There's kind of two avenues to get connected with ​ Expedia group, the first way is by reaching out to us. And you can do that by two, two avenues. Number one, you can go to VRBOadvocates.com, which is a website we have that gives a background on advocacy efforts gives you a little bit of support when it comes to messaging about fair and effective regulations. And gives you access to some of the vacation rental alliances that we're helping across the United States today. So I would encourage folks to visit VrboAdvocates.com also, we have [email protected]. So folks are listening and whether they've had a local line For five years and want to take it to the next level, or they want to get involved themselves, or they want to start a group, people are more than happy to reach out to the Government Affairs at verbo, calm. And then also just reach out to me directly. So [email protected], or [email protected] and you can get me directly happy to connect and talk one on one with folks that are looking to get engaged more robustly. But then also, it's incumbent upon us as a platform to reach out to folks that may be going through these fights themselves. So we do quite a bit of outreach to property managers that are in communities that may be facing local regulations, or may be on the precipice of having these conversations locally. To date, over the course of the last two and a half years, we've helped create or support over 147, I believe, local alliances at this point. So hopefully the folks on this phone if you haven't heard from us, you will. But if you haven't, and you want us to help support, engage, hear what's happening in your community, you can reach out to me directly or go to verbal advocates calm or [email protected].

Dana Lubner Awesome. I'm curious if Expedia group offers things like the ability to ​ send people to speak or testify at public meetings or have conversations with city officials?

Phil Minardi (Expedia) Yeah, absolutely. So we Expedia group's government ​ affairs team covers different regions. So we have a government affairs manager that covers the East Coast that covers the West Coast that covers the Midwest that covers the South Central. And these folks spend every waking moment every day, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, in some cases, not only helping

local property managers, but going to city council meetings, meeting with elected officials meeting with governors meeting with mayors meeting with city council members, to not only convey the value proposition of the vacation rental marketplace, but also help elected officials understand what fair and effective policies look like. So absolutely, if you haven't, again, reach out to me directly. And I'm happy to make that connection.

Dana Lubner And now's a good chance to share our third major takeaway of this ​ episode, advocacy is hard. Here is Jonah reminding us that the otas are not going to do our job for us.

Jonah Mechanic (Seabreeze VR San Diego) We don't do this for a living, you ​ know, we're not, we're not looking at how to navigate political landscape downtown 24 seven, we're looking at how are we gonna get houses cleaned before four o'clock when the guests are banging on the door, and their kids are crying in the back of the car. So to have someone you know, like Expedia have our back and a true partner has been essential. And there's no way we'd be there today without it. Now, with that being said, to anyone listening right now, keep in mind that Expedia is a worldwide organization. And they're not only focused on protecting short term rentals in your little slice of the globe, they have a worldwide business to manage across the board, they are not going to do the heavy lifting for you. They are not going to form the local organizations put in the groundwork, they can't, nor should they. So what they look for is a well organized, well run and well funded local organization that they can assist. So you as the local need to be the one to start the organization to round the troops up to get your website started to start your advocacy to start meeting with people downtown to really show these otas that, hey, we got our proverbial stuff together, right?

Jonah Mechanic (Seabreeze VR San Diego) We're committed we're a local ​ organization made with local homeowners and restaurant owners that are already committed to this cause and have already started a group they're already collecting funds are meeting with council members downtown. We're already got this ball rolling. Now Expedia. Can you help us? Can you help support us in our efforts? Expedia has been very good in situations like that, whether it be Los Angeles, San Diego, Palm Springs, the list goes on and on. However, don't just think that you can sit back really do nothing and hope that Expedia is just going

to come in and save the day. Because they're not and nor should they. And that's something that you know, we're very thankful for. But at the same time, I've had conversations with other hosts, you know, in different cities that seem to think that what's okay Expedia or Airbnb are just gonna come in and save the day and I have to educate them that you know what, that's not really how it works at all.

Dana Lubner Another hard aspect of this fight is engaging with anti vacation rental ​ groups, many who may seem unreasonable at the outset. When we dig a little deeper, they're often just neighbors concerned about the health of their local communities. Claire of San and Sea Properties in Galveston, Texas has built a successful business and host community. I asked her how to engage with this kind of opposition group.

Dana Lubner It's hard having difficult conversations, and especially walking right into a ​ room where, as you said, they'll throw tomatoes at you. Do you have any strategic advice about how to approach groups that you would consider as opposition, or ways that you would just suggest that approach it overall?

Claire Reisweig (GARM) Listen to take the tomatoes. So one of my first things ​ that I had to do in Galveston back in 2004, is and was no sweat off my back because I had just come back to town. So I would stand at these community meetings. And I'd say, I'm here to listen, what are the biggest problems that you have with vacation rentals. And, you know, some people were nice explaining the problems. Other people were angry, I took copious notes, we gathered them up. And then the GARM companies just sat down together and said, what are we going to do about it? Now, listen, it's not easy to sit there and have people criticize you and criticize your business. And just complain, it's not easy. But in the end, we were able to say, "wow, there's only three things they're really concerned with."

Claire Reisweig (GARM) They're concerned with over occupancy, with noise ​ and parking problems. And oh, and trash and trash was another one. And all of those, we said, we can cope with all of these. And that's when we came up with the solutions and ended up evolving into the common registrations, police officers to patrol we knew that people having that phone number 24/7 was critical. And we mandated how many trash cans that each homeowner had to get from the city to make sure that trash was handled adequately. And then, of

course, our GARM officers are helping maintain the parking regulations, we agreed to four cars per house in any given subdivision on the West End. So all of those things we said, you know, it's really not, you know, when you sit down and listen to people, you're going to find common threads and what they're asking for, which will help you come up with solutions.

Dana Lubner This season, we decided to do just that. Listen, and share with you what ​ we learned. Here's Jessica Black of Moms Against Vacation Rentals, and what needs to happen to find compromise and communities across the nation.

Jessica Black (Moms Against Short Term Rentals) I think you have to work ​ with the community to be sustainable, because you can't just commodify an entire community and have that work long term there has to it has to work for the people that live there going through the battle here in my town. You know, you hear all this live like a local belong anywhere. I mean, bring people together, it was a war and it felt like it was tearing our community apart. And it still in a sense is because those short term rental owners sued, and there's still this looming threat of them trying to preempt our ordinance again.

Jessica Black (Moms Against Short Term Rentals) You can fight and fight ​ and fight to get in somewhere where you're not wanted, but it's not going to end well. You know, I've thought, Well, we've kind of come up in my brain contingency plans like "okay, say, save their lawsuits succeeds, or say they do get a preemption bill. What would I do?" I don't think many neighbors would just roll over and say, Oh, well, I guess I live next to a hotel now. Um, you know, we've talked about "Okay, maybe we go and form a one rule HOA." And handle it that way. Although, you know, all the neighbors had to go spend money to do it. That's a little annoying, and it would probably end up just being the more affluent neighborhoods that could afford to do that. You know, there's private nuisance lawsuits, there's just sticking the you know, we don't want to Airbnb in our neighborhood signs in the front yard and making guests so it's unless you work with the community to figure out how it makes sense. The battle's not gonna end.

Dana Lubner The final key takeaway from this episode is the fight never stops. Here's ​ Paige on advocacy, never sleeping and how to keep up the fight while keeping some balance in your life.

Paige Teel (NEVRP) Advocacy never stops and that's one thing that I've newly ​ had to, I guess learn or take advice from, you know, folks like yourself or from Audrey or from other people who have been in That fine balance to say, you know, it's okay to, you know, do an autoresponder and say around the office, it's okay not to accept the phone call because I do feel guilty in a way, you know, you feel like I have a lot of personal responsibility in my job in the role that I have as president and I have to remind myself that, you know, I am I am one person, and I can try to do as much as I can. But, you know, relying on my team and relying on on the experience around me, is also something that I have to remind myself daily to just say, you know, it's not all on you, you have to, you know, delegate, and you have to be okay with not getting it all done, and you can't work 25 hours a day. So it's, it's a constant reminder, I mean, I if I could put a reminder in my phone every day at 1 o'clock to remind myself to breathe and to eat, and probably would help me a lot at this point, especially.

Dana Lubner And here is Eric Bay. And what happens if the fight does stop? ​

Eric Bay (ANP) It was fairly hard to pitch the idea of membership, when some of ​ the members said, "Well, we failed, we don't have licenses anymore. We're not licensed, we're not legal, why do we want to even continue?" Which, is a whole nother challenge trying to explain to them, you know, initially, we said, "if you're not at the table, they're going to eat you for lunch." Well, now we're at the table, and maybe some feel they have eaten us for lunch. But they're still a few more courses left in the meal, and we need to stay active.

Eric Bay (ANP) As a vocal player, it's just a matter of getting them to not be ​ discouraged and saying, "hey, collectively, we can do this. If it's just you one person, you're not either going to have the intuition or the inclination or the desire to go forward. But everybody in this room has that same goal. And that same mindset so. So collectively, we could do this, it's important for those who are too afraid. And for those who are lacking the knowledge, or the resources, or for your housekeeper, or for your gardener, or for your maintenance man. So this problem is bigger than you in when we needed to join the efforts to make sure that you're helping not only you, but others."

Matt Landau And for me, Dana, one of the things that is consistent throughout is ​ independent owners and managers, stakeholders of any given destination participating, raising their hand, stepping forward, contributing to their short term rental community. Of course, some people do it much more than others. Some people do it in different ways than others. But in the best instances, there are communities where the stakeholders have decided to individually step up and act as a group. And the very harsh reality for the people who are listening. And perhaps worse, the people who are not listening to this podcast is that if you're not participating in your short term rental community, if you're not in some way, contributing to that local greater good, you have absolutely no right to complain about the industry when things go wrong, you have absolutely no right to point fingers when there's some kind of crisis hitting.

Dana Lubner All right listener, the ball is in your court! Now is the time to get involved. ​ Find your local short term rental advocacy group and tell them you want to attend the next meeting. Don't have a local group, call your competitor or a colleague down the street and form a group. And remember, Phil from Expedia group, and Dave from Rent Responsibly, are great resources to lean on. And of course, you can always reach out to me, I'm happy to help you in any way I can. If you'd like my personal input on your destination, feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] and I would be happy to connect with you. We want to give a shout out to Rented the leading provider of full service revenue management for professional vacation rental managers for helping us get this important word out.

Dana Lubner Consider this your wake up call. This has to be done. It works but it is ​ hard It never stops. But again, it has to be done. In this season, we'll learn how to build your group, how to get the attention of government, how to tell a public story, how to pay for it, and how not to burn out while doing so. I'm Dana Lindner and thank you for listening. Please leave us a review or comment on your platform of choice. And tune in next week for our journey into advocacy. Make sure you subscribe today so you don't miss a single episode.

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Ep. 2: Journey into Advocacy

Megan McCrea (NASTRA) We have 275 what we call memberships, but we ​ believe that represents anywhere from 800 to 1000 homes.

Darik Eaton What worked well for us is having a small group of people that ​ were really active and kind of leading the charge, and then a larger group of people that would show up when we needed them to.

Claire Reisweig (GARM) We've been really lucky that we keep such good ​ relationships with not only the homeowners associations, but also with the city and other organizations. We were all for creating a collaborative Good Neighbor policy. And it has served us well.

Patricia Moore (Citizens for STR) In the Northern Virginia area, the regulations ​ are so intense, that if you are a resident, you can rent a total of 60 days annually. That's it. If you're not a resident of Fairfax County, you can't rent for anything less than 30 days at all, it is now illegal.

David Krauss (Rent Responsibly) If you're a human being with a heartbeat, ​ and you're listening to this podcast you care to some extent about what we're talking about. And that means that you can't look in the mirror and think that we're talking to somebody else we are talking to you.

Dana Lubner From my friends at VRMB communities. This is how to save your ​ vacation rental business, a 10 part educational series about the do's and don'ts of sustainable short term rentals. This episode is brought to you by Track powered by Travel Net Solutions, providing integrated solutions to transform the way vacation rental hospitality works. I'm being a listener. This is Episode Two, our journey into advocacy.

Dana Lubner In this episode, we're going to learn how to get involved in advocacy if ​ you're not already. Whether you own a vacation rental company, work for one or simply just rent a room in your home. If you're already involved, you'll learn how to inspire others in your organization to take the same journey and hear about ways to organize and connect that you may not have considered. Go learn how to find advocacy groups if they already exist in your area, and create one if there isn't one yet. You'll also learn what an advocacy group can be good for, besides just the regulatory fight. If you are a neighbor or a city official, or even someone who stays in a short term rental when you travel, I hope that my journey into advocacy can help you learn that you are a critical part of the conversation. And your voice is more important now than ever to ensure a future for short term rentals.

Dana Lubner Hello, and welcome back to my show. Today I'll be sharing with you my ​ journey into advocacy from attending a few meetings to hosting a city wide event and eventually going farther than I ever anticipated I would. Along the way we're going to hear from industry voices that ended up on the same path. Though they all started from different places. No one was trained for this in every town, every destination is different. But groups and resources are all around you. Let's dive into the journey.

Dana Lubner I joined my brother's company at the start of 2018. I really didn't have any ​ experience with Vacation Rentals other than staying in them throughout my life. I was drawn to the job and the opportunity because I love working with my family. And my brother said to me, this is something that's fun and cutting edge and new and I think you do really great at it. So I decided, hey, what the heck, I'll give it a shot. Little did I know that I would absolutely fall in love with the industry. And I find myself eating up every opportunity I had to educate myself and get to improve the way our business was operating by learning from others in the space. Back in 2015 short term rentals in the city of Denver were considered illegal. They were unregulated. They were growing at a rapid pace. And the opportunity to make money was everywhere you turn to investors, we're starting to see the city of Denver being a great destination to buy properties and Airbnb them.

Dana Lubner Eventually, in 2016, and into the first half of 2017, the city decided that ​ they were going to regulate the industry, the decision that they made was to require the property to be a primary residence. You know, in a lot of ways, I think that that decision was short sighted. But when I came on board in 2018, the decision had been made. And we were just dealing with figuring out how to navigate with these regulations in place. And when I joined the team, I realized, let's make sure we're attending these city meetings, there's no reason we shouldn't be there, even though we already know the rules. Because as we found out, even when you know, the rules, things can still change.

And there's nothing that's set in stone. So we started attending the city meetings. And notice that every time there was an opportunity for public comment, it was people telling negative stories about the industry. And the city officials and the people on the Short Term Rental Advisory Committee. were hearing only negativity about short term rentals and vacation rental operators, it was clear that there was a misrepresentation taking place. And if we didn't start showing up to these meetings with positive narratives, things were going to go south fast. And they really did.

Dana Lubner Advocacy was the last thing Paige Teel from On The Water in Maine was ​ thinking about when she first started in the vacation rental industry.

Paige Teel (NEVRP) I was kind of doing a couple different odd jobs. And one of ​ my friends approached me and she said, "You know, if you want to make some extra cash, you know, you can get to be a housekeeper for vacation rentals," because that was obviously a big deal. So I kind of started in this industry as a housekeeper, when she can talk about kind of starting from what I think isn't one of the most important roles in this industry, but also seeing the different facets of the industry and in the background of everything.

Paige Teel (NEVRP) But I actually was on the cleaning crew with the owner of ​ the company, and I worked for her for about a month or two. And she said "hey, do you want to come in and, you know, interview for a job we're looking for to add someone to our team?" And I said "yeah, absolutely, you know, I'm not anything serious that I want to be and I just kind of refreshing after my little bit in New York." So I went in and halfway through the interview, they told me they're interviewing me for the General Manager position. So I was a little bit thrown, but I was excited. And it started from there, I got a crash course on all the rentals, the hiring, the scope, the owners, I'm part of the property acquisition team and a little bit of everything. This is exactly the career I want to be in for the rest of my life is this is what I want to do. Eventually, I'd love to own my own company, but I'm right now just learning and, and absorbing as much as I can.

Paige Teel (NEVRP) As far as the advocacy side we've always been a member ​ of the vacation rental professionals of Maine, as well as the Northeast Vacation Rental Professionals. And we always had a board member spot, which I was representative from our company and took over as that board member just a year

ago. So I was on the board learning and then they asked me in the fall, they said well do you want to run for the president, we think you'd be a great fit. And I said “I'll run” I said, you know, no pressure don't feel like you have to vote for me and, and they let me know that I was voted in and that was in December of this last year. So it's been hectic, but I've been excited because this is exactly what I do. I kind of I'm very passionate about what I do about, about work about personal growth. So I kind of am 100% in whenever I do something. So that's one of the reasons why I'm huge into the a word into advocacy and in trying to do my part when I can.

Dana Lubner I think you know, the characteristic of passion is without a doubt of ​ requirement for anybody that's in our industry, never mind doing leadership, advocacy community work, and I can hear it in what you've just shared with us about, you know, caring about the industry in a way that gives you the courage to take a leap of faith.

David Krauss (Rent Responsibly) First of all, you have to be excited about it to ​ get other people excited about it. I think fundamentally, there is this herculean mentality of he or she who raises their hand first. And it's that limitless sense, that usually means that one person is bearing a disproportionate amount of the work and the weight. And so I think getting people excited about community building first has to do with thinking more about empowering others and getting other folks involved than it does about what the one leader is capable of withstanding. And I'll give you a concrete example on this.

David Krauss (Rent Responsibly) Megan McCrea is one of my heroes. I know, ​ you'll probably hear her name, you know, in any sort of hallway that's reverberating about advocacy because of the work she's done in Nashville over the last four plus years. I went to Nashville four years ago, and she was just stepping into basically a vacated leadership position. Within Nashville Area Short Term Rental Alliance, she took a two year term. It's now your three, guess who's still doing that. And leading. And, you know, she has, I think of this image of Atlas, right holding up the world on her back. And in that is, frankly, why I wake up is because if we can alleviate the burden of that community building that advocacy effort, by providing easy to use accessible tools to a Megan McCrea or frankly, the next Megan McCrea, they will then get more out of it, you know, two, three years on and feel like they're still holding up the weight of this that this entire group,

Dana Lubner Dave from Rent Responsibly has been a key player in my journey into ​ advocacy. Nashville is another city that has had a long regulatory battle. Even legal grandfathered in Vacation Rentals have come under threat. Every city is different. But this rolling back of existing regulations is something we're seeing more and more across the country. Megan McCrea started her vacation rental business as a side hustle. She loved hosting and providing an incredible hospitality experience. Regulation was not part of the picture, until she went to a meeting and realized this business she was building and falling in love with could all go away.

Megan McCrea (NASTRA) I come from the corporate world. And just over four ​ years ago, my husband and I purchased our first fixer upper, with the intent to use it as a short term rental. And it just sort of, I guess, was in my blood, I didn't know it. And we fell in love. Or I should say I fell in love. I mean, he likes it, but he's not very involved with it. So immediately, just from the whole process of setting it up to welcoming and interacting with guests. And one thing led to another and here we are, fast forward. Four years later, I have left my full time corporate job. And we have six of our own properties that I run. And then I also help other people set up their short term rentals now as well. a month or two after we had started welcoming guests. Airbnb hosted a meet up here in the community it was when they were launching co hosts.

Megan McCrea (NASTRA) So it was a while ago. And I met the president of ​ NASTRA at the time there who came and said, Listen, the city is planning to shut us down. And I just remember, I remember the feeling of like, What are you talking about, you know, my heart just sank. I couldn't really wrap my head around why anyone would think this is bad, right? She passed out information about coming to a meeting. And so I went with my husband and I went and the stuff I was hearing -- it almost sounded unreal. And even though it was early, I was already too far into it as far as welcoming guests and just really enjoying it even though I still had a full time thing, and this was just a hobby. I honestly couldn't imagine what it would be like to not do it anymore. And I started volunteering with the organization and met several other hosts and found out I was not alone in that feeling. And 90% of the hosts were super involved, very engaged in the day to day really interacting with their guests, showing them places you know, I always say beyond Broadway I just thought like, we can't have this. And that was when I knew I had to fight just not only for myself and for guests, but for these fellow hosts who felt the same way that I did.

Dana Lubner Amazing. So it sounds like your moment of truth and you got involved. ​ That wasn't when the advocacy groups started the advocacy group NASTRA was already formed at the time?

Megan McCrea (NASTRA) It was and it really didn't even start as an advocacy ​ group. They started it as just a host connection group. But they didn't get too far into that, because literally, it started and then legislation started happening as well. So they quickly had to pivot and get into the advocacy role.

Dana Lubner A key takeaway to remember is that no one was formally trained to do ​ this. Whether it's your company, a company you work for, or someone that works for you, anyone has the potential to become a key player in the advocacy fight. The key is a passion for hospitality, and an inciting incident to let yourself or them know that this could all end if I stand isn't taken. This inciting incident could be attending a local host meetup, a city council meeting, or even listening to this podcast. In my research, I found that simply keeping your eyes out for your own inciting incident is the first step to make the journey happen. Keep your eyes open for your inciting incident. Listen for that call to arms. This is the first step to making the journey happen.

Dana Lubner STRAC stands for Short Term Rental Advisory Committee, it's the only ​ committee that meets on an ongoing basis underneath our license umbrella and the city of Denver. I'm the kind of person that likes to become as much of an expert on any industry or field or position I stepped into. So when I joined the team at Effortless, I started to notice that there were some meetings happening about every other month. And I didn't know what they were about. And I asked my brother, he told me the background of stracke, and how they were used to help create the current regulation landscape, but that we weren't really going as frequently as we had in the past, when things were still so unknown.

Dana Lubner So I decided, hey, let's start going to these, we can do this. And we ​ should do this, we realized we needed to have better representation there. And so once we went to those meetings is when we really realized, Hey, no one else on our side of the fence is going into these meetings. And we really needed to make sure that we had better representation there. And at the time, there was a group of us that were emailing back and forth about what we were hearing that was happening in the city are speculations about possibilities that we're going to be changing or impacting regulations in the future.

Dana Lubner From that email chain. We said, hey, let's meet in person, let's make this ​ official, let's formalize ourselves. And so we decided to meet at one of the property managers office locations. We had probably about seven of us at that first meeting. And we dove right in it was almost like there was no time to waste with small talk and let's get to know each other. And we literally had a whiteboard on the wall. And we're mapping out what our biggest concerns were, where our biggest hurdles were, and what our goals were, what we were looking to accomplish in a three phase tear. And from there, that's I'd say we're Mile High Hosts was born when we realized, hey, this isn't something we can do by ourselves. We all have to collectively work on this together.

Joe Pergolizzi We were painting different pictures, different scenarios. What ​ kind of outcomes do we want? How do we help elevate the conversation? How can we, you know, be part of the solutions to short term rentals in Denver?

Dana Lubner Joe Pergolizzi was a founding member of the Mile High Hosts in Denver ​ and someone that has inspired me greatly and my own journey.

Joe Pergolizzi The group kind of fizzled in, you know, in the Spring. I didn't ​ really call any other additional meetings. And then there was a case that god there's a couple that got charged with felony charges on June 10 or 11th. And as soon as I got wind of that, I sent out an A message text message to all the people that were participating in those group phone calls, and I said you know it's time to me like now's the time to take it seriously. And then we had our first meeting in person, meaning. In July of 2019, and I lead those meetings and that's how it kicked off. That's how we started Mile High Hosts.

Dana Lubner Did you have any hesitations about bringing, quote unquote, competitors ​ together? When you were forming this advocacy group?

Joe Pergolizzi That's exactly one of the nuances that I learned to cultivate, ​ which was looking at instead of people being competitors, how can you actually be allies. So I knew that there was going to be some hesitancy at first between management companies and how they were going to view their quote, unquote, competitors. But I knew how to frame it and in which is, "hey, there's enough, there's enough business for everybody. And the bigger cause here isn't really our businesses, the bigger cause here is the actual regulations. And if we don't work together, we're really not going to have a chance at this."

Joe Pergolizzi If we do work together, there's a lot more to gain from it not only ​ just from regulations being more favorable, but perhaps there's resource management that can be exchanged. I'm an opportunist. I'm probably a natural born optimist. And there's a lot to be explored when you're working in your industry. And especially this, this kind of industry, which is still so new, and in its infancy, there's a ton of opportunities for businesses like minded people to work together.

Dana Lubner I think when it comes to formalizing a group, when it's something that is a ​ topic that potentially put your livelihood on the line, everyone kind of sits up with a vigilance and says, Hey, I need to be part of this conversation. If this is going to impact me, my future business and my livelihood, I definitely want to be involved. And so I would say a majority of the property managers and the more passionate hosts were there on day one, and they've been engaged from the very beginning. We wanted to do so much right away and hit the ground running.

Dana Lubner And when you see that things are functioning in a way that you strongly ​ feel an opposition to, you want to just dive right in and fix things and kind of start pushing your agenda from the get go. And what we realized and what was so beautiful about having a group with different perspectives and different viewpoints is we found that our end goal we are finally able to start working on today. And what phase one really had to be was a focus on shifting the narrative from the negativity we were seeing at Strack meetings, the negativity we were seeing in newspaper headlines, this whole behavior of treating hosting in the city of Denver, as though it was a criminal activity. So we had to do work of shifting that narrative if we were ever going to get anywhere. And from there, we said, hey, how often does our group one?

Dana Lubner I mean, what can we all commit to? We realized that while this was a ​ volunteer gathering that we were doing, if we didn't volunteer our time to do it, we weren't going to have a business in the future. So from there, we decided we would do weekly meetings. And we worked backwards from phase three saying, Okay, now what does phase two look like? And what does phase one look like? And then further broke down each one of those phases into steps that we could start executing. Every city and town are different, but as Dave can tell us, there are resources around you when you know where to look.

David Krauss (Rent Responsibly) So there's about 25 groups that were ​ engaged with at the moment. Now, mile high hosts is an example of an existing group that we support. We also are helping local folks get started and helping them start their own group, which is a much more involved process. It involves a lot more partners, and a lot more leadership development. Dana showed up as a leader, I had already raised their hand and it's already doing a great job. So we were trying to build tools in this regard. In other cases, you know, helping with the basics website, email address, cadence or chart, subcommittees, engaging with local representatives and local media, things of that nature.

David Krauss (Rent Responsibly) Oftentimes, these groups have to be ​ constituted and mustered quickly, because they weren't there and our community was already looking at regulation that we might not consider fair or reasonable or even effective. And so it's a battle you know, battle by the time these groups get stood up. Our vision and mission is to make sure that we have strong existing 12 months of the year groups in every major city and every minor city eventually, so that folks are not just fighting or battle ready. They're building the sustainable future that they want in their community. And they're well respected and embraced in their community.

Dana Lubner We sent out an email blast to hosts with the help of the otas online travel ​ agencies, asking them to attend a meeting where they could learn about regulation changes. And I think the citizens of Denver have been always very wary about regulation changes. It's probably like that around the world. But as soon as they heard that something could be changing with regulations, they also woke up and attended this meeting where we told them, there was a potential of a restriction on the number of days that you could rent your primary residence as a short term rental.

Dana Lubner They talked about capping the days at 183 days out of the year. And ​ hosts got really worried about this. And we told them that the best way for them to make impact and make change and make sure this doesn't happen is to attend the next track meeting. And now a word from our sponsor. Track Hospitality Software is powered by travel Net Solutions and industry leading hospitality company. Track is a portfolio software designed specifically with your vacation rental management company in mind. From cloud contact center to property management software, including features such as trust, accounting, maintenance, housekeeping, owner, portal, guest portal channel distribution, and more. All in one platform, create seamless operations and increase revenue with track to learn more about track hospitality software, visit trackhs.com.

Dana Lubner So at that next STRAC meeting, we had about 150 hosts show up and ​ sign up to speak in public comment. Typically, I'd say there's maybe about a max of eight to 10 hosts that show up. So this was a huge difference. It was a standing room only, there was overflow, there was just a vivacious visceral buzz within that room. And it became very clear that the hosting community was no longer asleep at the wheel, and that they weren't going to just lay down and let 183 days pass. And they were going to give specific reasons as to why that wasn't going to work for them. And the city listened, it was actually really amazing to see that they took 183 days off of the discussion.

Patricia Moore (Citizens for STR) So I was actually the founder and executive ​ director for citizens for STTR. And I came up with the name, and then we got a EIN, we went and got a nonprofit status, we encouraged a bunch of members to join us. And then we did all the background to pull all these people together. And then we literally had weekly meetings, we started in a local coffee shop here. And it was a long table that sat like 12. And by the third meeting, we had too many people for the coffee each year know, we were meeting weekly until we actually got together and then we were basically formulating how to advocate on our own behalf together as a group, you know, it takes time to kind of figure out those steps. And the earlier that you are in the process, the better. You got to be in this all the time to win.

Dana Lubner That was Patricia Moore of Citizens for STR. She'll be joining us in ​ Episode 3 as we get into the How-to portion of creating, running and maintaining these kinds of groups.

Patricia Moore (Citizens for STR) As strongly as I feel about this, when people ​ actually get up and are willing to testify and say I am supporting vacation rentals, I'm here to support them. You know you have an advocate or a friend that's standing next to you. And it takes very little to reach out together and pull those people together. The thing that takes time is relationships, it's really getting to know each other. So the things that you find out when you sit down with those people is everybody has a certain skill set that you probably don't have and the more diverse your group is, the more successful you'll be.

Patricia Moore (Citizens for STR) And then you basically ask people Okay, so ​ I reached out -- can you do me a favor and reach out to eight people, and then ask those eight people to reach out to eight more people? You assign a small group within your group to actually reach out to a lot of people. And just in the state of Virginia alone, there are 10,000 hosts 10,000 there's plenty of people to reach out to.

Dana Lubner The second big takeaway from this journey into advocacy is you may ​ already have an advocacy group in your local area. Googling, asking around the community, finding another host as a mentor, or reaching out to the booking platforms are always to find them. If there isn't a group yet, emailing a few local businesses and starting to discuss common threats is a great way to start. Remember, no one was formally trained in this, that there is a difference between trying to reinvent the wheel and using the knowledge from the experts around you.

Phil Minardi (Expedia) I am incredibly proud of the team that we've built at ​ Expedia group, we have experts in policy, we have experts in communications, we have experts in advocacy, working every day to promote fair and effective policies that protect vacation rental communities across this country. So I would say the team here is, is at the disposal of both individuals that are looking to advocate for themselves in their community, but also for individuals that are looking to create a local Alliance and need that support.

Phil Minardi (Expedia) So this team is here for individual PMS or owners, as ​ well as groups that are looking to get started, get more engagement in the media, grow their membership, understand regulatory language, any any component of a conversation around regulations that an individual or local group may be

looking to understand better, or maybe looking to take advantage of or may be looking to get started in. We are here to help. So I would encourage folks listening not only to think of us as lobbyists, but also advocacy experts, PR experts, and just good partners, as you're looking to get engaged in the policy conversation happening in your community.

Dana Lubner When you're ready for support from the booking platforms, remember you ​ can reach out, Phil's email will be in the show notes.

Dana Lubner With Mile High Hosts fully formed and meeting regularly, we had to focus ​ on changing the narrative. As we realized at the Strack meetings, things were not perfect, as much as we were upset that there was a misrepresentation of the host and community. Because of a few bad actors. We also had to take some responsibility and listen to what the complaints were how we were maybe negatively impacting neighborhoods, how we were maybe being a nuisance or disturbance and not using best practices, we realize we have an opportunity to create an event where we could share best practices, and show others how professional we were as a community. And that's how the idea of the Good Neighbor Summit was born.

Dana Lubner I hopped on a phone with a good friend of mine and I said, Tell me ​ everything you know about strategic communications, we need help. And he gave me so many good pieces of advice. And he told me exactly what my steps were and what we needed to put into place to make sure that we had media coverage, and our event was going to be a success.

Dana Lubner We invited industry leaders that are well known in the space to speak. ​ We invited a former city council woman that was there when the regulations came into place. We invited our local dmo destination marketing organization to tell us all the fun facts that hosts should know about our vibrant community. And we invited the host and community as well as city officials. We wanted to make sure that everyone that was a shareholder or stakeholder in the community was able to learn to be inspired and connect with each other.

Dana Lubner As so much of our world operates at this digital level where there isn't the ​ connection or the opportunity to sit around and table and say hey, this is what I'm doing that's been successful and learning and listening from others. Joe was a critical part of putting the good neighbor summit together.

Joe Pergolizzi I wanted it to be a strong show of professionalism. And force. ​ And I wanted to try and move the conversation, even if it was two millimeters, I wanted to put a stake in the ground and show whoever was listening, that there's more to this story, that there's another strong, significant voice. So the first goal was a direct message to the city. The second goal was to try and give hosts some shelter, some reprieve, because what no one really gets is that there are 1000s of people who don't have a voice who are sitting at home going, why is it this way? Why can't it be that way? I don't understand why can't we move the needle on this, and there's no vehicle for there's no megaphone, there's no outlet for these people, to get involved to have their voice represented, I believe in community. And I believe that if you build it, they will come, I wanted the host community to at least on my watch, know that there was the possibility that their voices can come together and do something good. So maybe someone attended the good neighbor summit, and they were like, that was really educational, that was great. But what would have been a bigger achievement is if they looked around, and they felt that they were part of something.

Dana Lubner The event itself was incredibly inspiring to me on a personal level, it was ​ amazing to bring the community together and get the positive feedback that we saw as an outcome. We are also able to get news coverage that we were looking for, I believe we had five news stations, two of which did video production of the event itself and a couple of newspapers that wrote up about the event. It was representing the hosting community in a way it had not yet been represented. And it felt amazing. We had a short term rental advisory committee meeting shortly thereafter. And the shift I could feel in the room that day gives me goosebumps right now to even think about. People were saying hello to each other that were on opposite sides of this topic.

Dana Lubner There was friendliness and greetings, even a "Hey, I saw you on the ​ news" from somebody that has been a real big thorn in our side as far as trying to have our community be viewed as a positive impact. And so I'd say, even in the agenda for that Strack meeting, we got acknowledged as putting on this powerful event that really shared best practices and helped educate and showed that the hosting community does care about their impact. There was without a doubt, a huge shift in the 'us versus them' that we had felt over the last year and a half prior. Hosting events and changing the narrative is just one of the things you can do with your host group once you've joined or created it. outside of the box solutions for your community, or your business can create a better operating environment and increase revenue for everyone involved. Claire from Sand N Sea in Galveston, Texas has one of the most advanced community groups in the country. Their self enforcement policy is a model for what hosts networks can achieve beyond advocacy.

Claire Reisweig (GARM) GARM stands for (it's not very elegant) but it's the ​ Galveston association of rental managers. And we are an organization of six property management companies who abide by common rules and regulations and share a 24 hour patrol service of off duty police officers. So our common rules and regulations that we have is that we all share the same registration form and the same, I think we call it now the guest code of conduct. And our guests are filling out the same information names, ages, the cars that are going to be there and they agree to the rules that we have set up that literally have been changed by only one thing that the city asked us to add in.

Claire Reisweig (GARM) But over all these years (we're going on 15 years) ​ only one thing has been added to that guest Code of Conduct form. We all agree to pay our hotel tax on time. We all agree that we're going to have 24 seven contacts. We all agree that If our patrol officer calls, we'll be there within the hour to handle anything that needs to be handled. We're all local companies, we are very much on the ground, we have offices, and we're there to make sure that we are good neighbors to all of the areas where we do business.

Dana Lubner In the spring of 2020, there were some new vacancies on the Strack ​ board announced my first reaction was absolutely not me. I don't want to be in the spotlight. I'm intimidated by policy and sitting alongside City Council, then my intuition said to me, Dana, this is the chance you have to have a seat at the table, literally and figuratively, this is the opportunity you have to help shape policy, and be even more connected with the individuals that are creating the agenda. I decided, without a doubt, I'm going to apply, and I'll figure it out as I go. And that's when in March, I was notified that I have been accepted to be a member of this board. It's been a really amazing opportunity.

Dana Lubner So far, we've only had three meetings as they meet every other month. ​ And the odd thing is it's all been obviously virtual, but it feels also really productive and well organized, it's given me the chance to ask questions during the presentation portion of the meeting, where in the past, as a an attendance of the public, you're only able to ask questions at the end or make a statement at the end. So as we're reviewing agenda, or looking at numbers or assessing complaints from people in the neighborhoods, asking those difficult questions has been instrumental, and I think really allowed for awareness and other people that are part of the organization as well.

Dana Lubner Our third and final takeaway is that this can go farther than you ever ​ thought it might at the beginning. Think outside the box with events like a good neighbor summit. Join city organizations or local government, create self enforcement groups with real teeth. And remember, to help each other out on the journey, you might be the one to create your local group or the one to host an event like the good neighbor summit, you might end up joining a city committee, or like Claire, create a self enforcement policy that everyone can get behind.

Dana Lubner Alright, listener, the ball is in your court. Now is the time to get involved. ​ Find your local short term rental advocacy group and tell them you want to attend the next meeting. Don't have a local group, call your competitor or a colleague down the street and form a group. What is your journey going to look like? If you'd like my input on your most pressing challenge, feel free to reach out to me at [email protected]

Dana Lubner We want to give a shout out to Rentals United for helping us get the word ​ out. Rentals United believes that advocacy is the most important mechanism to influence the future of our industry. And they support numerous associations in Europe and the United States.

Dana Lubner This was my journey into advocacy. When passion for business ​ encounters a mortal threat. The journey begins. Host groups exist all over the country. And if you live somewhere without one, we're giving you the resources to start your own. I'm Dana Lubner, and thank you for listening. Please leave us a review or comment on your platform of choice. and tune in next week for episode three go together, where we'll get into a step by step on organizing, running and maintaining one of these groups. Make sure you subscribe today so you don't miss a single episode.

For more help with your business, join the Inner Circle membership ​ ​

Ep. 3: Go Together

Darik Eaton We haven't done a great job as a group to keep connected and ​ keep together. Part of that is that down to two of us. And then you throw in the challenges of current times. You know, we don't have bandwidth to, to spend, we need to kind of reboot and think about this. Because, you know, we all know that the fight isn't ever over.

Megan McCrea (NASTRA) Not for lack of desire or want for most people. It truly is a ​ lack of time, there's only so much time in a day. And if you have a full time job, and all these other things going on, there's very little that you can put into that.

Joe Pergolizzi And when I did the math, I realized that there, I wasn't the leader ​ from a strategic perspective, I realized I couldn't be the leader.

Dana Lubner From my friends at VRMB Communities. This is how to save your ​ vacation rental business, a 10-part educational series about the do's and don'ts of sustainable short term rentals. This episode is brought to you by Track powered by Travel Net Solutions, providing integrated solutions to transform the way vacation rental hospitality works. This is episode 3: Go Together. In this episode, we'll learn how to reframe the way you think about competition. We'll learn how to organize plan and delegate within a host group and how to do so sustainably so you don't burn out and the group keeps meeting will learn also how to leverage your group to form key relationships in your community.

Dana Lubner Hello, everyone, and welcome back to my show. I'm really excited to get ​ into our first how to episode.

Matt Landau Hi, Dana Lubner. ​

Dana Lubner Hi, Matt Landau, how are you? ​

Matt Landau I'm doing great. I'm curious to hear how the podcast season is ​ going so far. Because from my side, it's tons of wonderful praise. People are really enjoying this podcast format. Are you hearing similar things?

Dana Lubner I've been hearing similar things I've kind of been blown away by how well ​ it has been received by others. And it's kind of been this twilight moment for me.

Matt Landau Are you receiving like emails from people? Because you do ​ include your email address at the end of each episode? I'm curious, what are you hearing?

Dana Lubner Yes, I am starting to wonder what I've gotten myself into. But it's nice to ​ know that people are having similar situations and similar challenges. And they're actually listening to this podcast because our whole goal with this podcast is to be a resource for those people and to inspire them to start their own community advocacy groups if they haven't already.

Matt Landau Yeah, I'm with you. I even heard that. Our podcast reminded ​ somebody of their favorite podcast Planet Money. That's a huge compliment.

Dana Lubner Massive props to Stuart and you. And I guess I'll take some myself on ​ that compliment.

Matt Landau Yes, you certainly deserve it. You're doing a great job. I think that ​ covers the pleasantries and banter that we have on our script that we're supposed to be going through right now. I think we should move into this particular episode, which is called Go Together. I love that name, don't you?

Dana Lubner I think it fits perfectly in a very straightforward kind of way on what we'll ​ be talking about in this episode.

Matt Landau And we should also share with listeners that in our exhaustive ​ brainstorming for a name for this podcast, we actually thought about go together because of its connection with this wonderful African proverb. "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." Yeah, go together. It's just like, it works. But of course, we didn't name the podcast series go together, because we want it to be way more boring and long and call it how to save your vacation rental business. But going together is such an important component of community building, right?

Dana Lubner It's the foundation of all of this. ​

Matt Landau As small business owners.We're not trained because few of us ​ have been formally trained in this. But our instinct, our survival instinct is to protect our house, protect our homes, if you will, to watch out for our business. And there's a lot of stress and work and brain power that is required there. What we don't instinctively think about is working together with our competitors, because small businesses are taught to fear or hate, or avoid or smash competitors, which is great, unless you have a fragmented industry like ours, in which a destination with too many competitors acting on their own is not sustainable. It's to everybody's great disadvantage, to not communicate with your local down the street. And, Dana, when you come across a property manager, there are fears in sharing or working together with the competitor, right?

Dana Lubner Absolutely. People want to keep their trade secrets that they think are so ​ unique to them, kind of behind closed doors.

Matt Landau Yeah. Why should I share my secret sauce? Why should I share a ​ template or a process that I've spent years refining? That's like my intellectual property? Why should I share it with you, Dana?

Dana Lubner Exactly. And as Heather Bayer says, is that there really are no secrets in ​ this industry, what you're doing is probably not entirely unique or unheard of. So I think it is a common default thought process with competitors to think what they're doing is greatly different than everyone else in the community.

Matt Landau And there is some degree of secret sauce. So it's not like you have ​ to completely expose yourself. Right?

Dana Lubner Yes, we hope you don't expose yourself because you know, then you ​ have serious threats to worry about.

Matt Landau But of all these other things that you could be sharing, or you ​ could be working on together with a competitor down the street: those concerns are really dwarfed, in comparison to the risks that you all face if you don't do it.

Dana Lubner Absolutely. ​

Matt Landau And the good news is that it goes further than just avoiding a ​ terrible regulatory threat. Working with your competitors. As we found in Blue Ridge, Georgia, when we were shooting Season 1 of a Sense of Place, the vacation rental managers of that destination, bound together and they achieved things that none of them could do on their own. They handpick the lowest week of the entire year, they created the blues and barbecue fest. They rented out tons of equipment that they now own, and actually lease out to other community groups. And they turned the low season into this really popular attraction in town. And that could never have been accomplished by just CJ Stam or just Paul Gribble alone. That is the kind of achievement that only comes when you're working as a group. And they've actually transition from fearing of losing guests to one another to the absolute opposite end of the spectrum. They're sharing overflow guests with one another. They're all in this together.

Dana Lubner Megan McCrea, with the Nashville Short Term Rental Association has a ​ good example of this as well. From the private Facebook group that creates a safe space for hosts to network to providing educational resources that benefit everyone in the group and go beyond advocacy. Her initiatives bring hosts together and make it easy to stop thinking about each other as competition. We'll be hearing from Megan quite a bit this episode.

Megan McCrea (NASTRA) We created a private Facebook group that is ​ members only which means everybody that's in there has been vetted. Having that group where people know it's a safe place to post what they're thinking and ask questions and that they're gonna get the right answers because on the public forums, it's like a read some of these answers and obviously can't answer every single one like, that's not even close to legal close to right. And so that has created a place for our members to be able to connect with each other outside of just like the board. Having that safe haven has been really good for engagement. The monthly meetups, what we always try to do is have a little bit of education, and fun. So 80% of the meeting is eating, drinking, talking networking. And then the rest is either education or updates. And one thing that I think that has been hugely helpful is we had to go beyond just being advocacy, people are exhausted of the political climate related to anything right now. So they hear one more thing that even halfway sounds political, and they're like, I'm out, right.

Megan McCrea (NASTRA) We brought in Justin Ford, from Breezeway who did ​ safety, we've brought in Proper Insurance and talked about insurance. And we've done hosting panels where we talk about hosting best practices and things that have nothing to do with being legal or political or advocating. It's just learning and being able to elevate our host community, because obviously, that's better for the community anyway, not just the host community, but the community around us if we have smart, responsible hosts. This way, we have a way to have them engage in the group and be a part of the group. And then they're going to get those political updates. But that's not the only thing they're getting from us.

Matt Landau And Dana, in Episode Two, we heard from your kind of advocacy, ​ mentor, Joe Pergolizzi. And he talked about how he didn't want people to feel like they were competitors. He wanted them to see the broader opportunity. Did you as a manager feel that way?

Dana Lubner If I'm being totally honest, it was my first thought. But it lasted only for a ​ second. You know, we had our first meeting at one of our competitors, office spaces. And I think whether that was intentional or not, it really made me swallow that way faster than I had any time to dwell on it. As well as the reality in Denver was so sick and so threatening, that there really wasn't the time to, you know, really marinate on the fact that we were competitors sitting around the table, we had to put that aside and focus at the immediate tasks at hand.

Matt Landau Thank you for being totally honest about that. ​

Dana Lubner Absolutely. I think the reality is when people are in a position where ​ maybe there isn't a massive threat on the horizon for them, they focus on the competitor factor. And I would encourage people, if they're not thinking of the first people to go to when building a community-based advocacy group, being their competitors, they need to reshift that thought pattern right away, because those are the people that oftentimes are going to be just as passionate about this issue or about the topics that may not even be there yet.

Matt Landau I also think that the longer you go without reaching out, and at ​ least having a dialogue and perhaps some teamwork with your competitors in your area, the longer you go, it's almost like a gap gets wider and wider to the point that like, now you're looking down the barrel of the gun. And you have such a distance between you and these other people, it's almost impossible to get over.

Dana Lubner It's the reason that I encourage people to shift away from that us versus ​ them or me versus you mentality, and dive into how it can be much more productive to be we focused.

Matt Landau We focused, I like that. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want ​ to go far go together. We're getting very good at this.

Dana Lubner The first big takeaway here to remember is that working with competitors ​ is not optional. It is obligatory, and even the most selfish of instances, the moment that you see that the health of your destination impacts your business, you will start to reframe the way you think about competition, you start to see them as allies all working towards the same goal. The vacation rental industry faces enough external threats, that the only way we can face them is together. Once you've decided to go together with the other hosts in your area, you really need to focus on how to run this group smoothly and in a way that isn't going to create burnout for members in a way that's going to maximize the potential usefulness of what is ultimately volunteer labor.

Dana Lubner When Joe stepped down, I took over the Mile High Hosts. This is what ​ I've learned over the last year and how to run a successful hosting group when our group first formed last year, we met weekly from 5-7 at one of the property managers office spaces. There was so much passion and enthusiasm that meetings would sometimes run two and a half, three hours long. During one of our first meetings, we defined our goals and objectives as a group, it was so important to have all kinds of voices at the table, which we did. We had passionate hosts, property managers, realtors, and everyone brought a different perspective. We discovered we had some differing of opinions on what our first mission should be. But eventually, we all agreed that our first task at hand was to improve the narrative and perception of hosts and our city hosts, we're not criminals, and we needed to create our own headlines that showed otherwise. Eventually, we landed on the good neighbor summit as our way to do just that.

Dana Lubner The group until recently was meeting on a weekly basis, which I think ​ makes sense depending on what you're trying to accomplish. We change things up a couple months ago, when we noticed we weren't making progress on the projects we were working on. So we broke the team up into committees, each committee focused on a specific project or initiative. Now our group meets once a month with committee meetings in between the committee lead updates the larger group on progress updates and future timelines during our monthly meetings, it feels like a better more productive setup working in smaller groups. There's no right answer for how often your group meets. The key is to have a regular schedule and plan an agenda so you know what to talk about when you do meet.

Dana Lubner When we first started the Mile High Hosts, we were in a super reactive ​ state, there was almost a frantic energy because of how bad things were in Denver. We didn't dive into roles and responsibilities right out of the gate, which if I could do it all over again, I would pause, take a breath and figure this part out first. And, Megan, I know you've shared this with a handful of people. And so if you don't mind, just give us an overview of how the group is structured, specifically around membership, and how well or how challenging that has been.

Megan McCrea (NASTRA) Typically, we maintain a board of five to seven ​ board members. And each of those members has their own responsibilities. We aren't just advisory, we're actually the ones processing memberships were also

the ones writing all of the emails and maintaining our website and writing the communications that go out to members city, we've created basically job descriptions of what those very specific responsibilities are, what the anticipated time commitment is, we asked all of our board members to just over the last few weeks, we said, write down basically anything you've ever had to do, and then write down what we're actively doing. And it became pretty apparent to us that we were doing far too much all of us. And I would say a lot of that fell on too few of us, we started thinking okay, realistically, is my time really best used processing memberships? Like, do I really need to be doing that? Or could we have somebody else doing that?

Megan McCrea (NASTRA) And so we came to the realization that we are going ​ to need somebody very similar to what Host2Host has in Portland, which is an executive director role. And it's actually a paid admin type role. Not that I want to bucket her as just an admin, but she does a lot of the admin responsibilities, and then some. And so we've created a job description for that. Our challenge right now is because there's not a new, whole slew of new memberships flowing in like there normally is due to COVID. You know, like, what do we have this person do initially? Is it worth bringing them on right now? Or do we need to wait until things shift? So we're sort of evaluating that, but I think that, in hindsight, we should have had that position from the moment the board formed. And I wish we had made that a priority. Because I think that at the board, we probably could have gotten a lot more strategically done. had we done that earlier.

Dana Lubner A lot of the structure that Megan has incorporated into nostre comes from ​ Debbie herder and her work at host to host initially frustrated that she couldn't talk with other hosts through Airbnb. She's gone from simply forming a group to developing best practices that we can all use.

Debi Hertert (Host2Host) Host 2 Host is a nonprofit trade association for the ​ home sharing host. We stand on three legs, we support: advocacy, education and community. We have committees underneath those areas, we've got Advocacy, we've got Business Outreach, Education, Meet up, the Nominating committee, Tech committee. When things pop up that we need to address, we'll create a committee around it, and ask one of the board members to head up that committee, and then put together a team. There's always something to learn. So I'm learning about how to run a nominating committee.

Megan McCrea (NASTRA) You'll hear me reference host to host in Portland a ​ lot, because we would be nowhere without their advice. And especially Debbie, she's been a huge, huge, huge help for me and mentor for me, one thing that they do that I just absolutely love is when a new member or partner joins, they call them and just like, welcome them. And we don't have time for that, you know. And so that's one of the things we thought if there are some other instances where we'll need somebody to help us, this person could actually really focus on really getting to know our members better and welcoming new members. And obviously, recruitment would be a piece of that as well. Then the other is an advocacy position. So obviously, this would be kind of keeping up to date with the legal type of stuff. And also, just in general, not just for our members, but also for the community at large, making sure that there's a general understanding and outreach of the laws that do exist.

Matt Landau Hey, Dana, Matt, here, can I interrupt real quickly? ​

Dana Lubner Come on in. ​

Matt Landau Thank you. I was really happy to hear Megan talk about ​ delegating. Because I have seen people like Megan and you, frankly, taking on immense amount of weight and responsibility on their shoulders, doing the majority of the heavy lifting. And without some delegating on behalf of the leader to your support group. It's not sustainable, you will eventually burn out is that what you found with the Mile High Hosts?

Dana Lubner That is exactly what we've experienced. I think it's one of the biggest ​ challenges of leadership is learning the skill of delegating and leaning on others, I don't know where I would be if it wasn't for my own group.

Matt Landau That's such a good segue into Claire who has established ​ something of a strict structure within their garm organization. But you need it to be strict in a sense, because if it's not really clearly defined, people will take that inch and run with it, they'll run a mile.

Claire Reisweig (GARM) GARM stands for (it's not very elegant, but it's) ​ Galveston Association of Rental Managers. And we are an organization of six property management companies who abide by common rules and regulations and share a 24-hour patrol service of off duty police officers. So our common rules and regulations that we have is that we all share the same registration form and the same, I think we call it now the guest code of conduct. And our guests are filling out the same information names, ages, the cars that are going to be there and they agree to the rules that we have set up that literally have been changed by only one thing that the city asked us to add in. But over all these years, we're going on 15 years, only one thing has been added to that guest Code of Conduct form. We all agree to pay our hotel tax on time, we all agree that we're going to have 24 seven contacts. We all agree that if our patrol officer calls, we'll be there within the hour to handle anything that needs to be handled. We're all local companies. We are very much on the ground. We have offices, and we're there to make sure that we are good neighbors to all of the areas where we do business.

Dana Lubner Claire's GARM group has a strict rule set and intensive time demands on ​ its members. Because of this, their community responsiveness and self enforcement policies are among the best in the country and their advocacy efforts are more successful. Even if you have a bigger group that can't ask so much of its members, some rules are key to getting things done. Megan has recently been implementing a stricter rule set.

Megan McCrea (NASTRA) I can tell you already, from a recruitment ​ perspective, trying to recruit board members, it has been hugely helpful because people are able to right away say, "I can't do that." And then we don't get in a position where we put somebody on the board, who is already on the board, and then figures out, I can't do that. So we're being able to just from a recruitment perspective, weed people out pretty quickly, that just won't have the time and don't have that commitment level. And I think that we're gonna see that setting that right expectation up front is going to really help as far as what actually happens, we've also talked about, do we need to put some mechanisms in place, and we haven't exactly figured out what that looks like that says, if you're not doing this, you know, almost like the three strikes rule, then if you're not meeting these expectations, then you'll automatically be expected to step down from your position, just so that it's not this awkward, like, "Hey, listen, you're really not doing

anything, would you mind like going away?" You know, cuz we've had to do that before, unfortunately, yeah.

Dana Lubner This is the first time I've ever been in charge of leading a group like this. ​ And what I mean by a group like this is a group of volunteers. Everyone is volunteering their time for the greater cause. And they oftentimes have busy lives. And so when you're in this leadership position, leading a group of volunteers, you notice that sometimes tasks or deadlines get missed. And what I think is really important is to set up expectations from the get go. I think the easiest time I've had being a success in any role or job I've had is when that success metric is defined. And so when we give out tasks or give people assignments, creating a deadline, and knowing that there's accountability is going to have a greater outcome of that task being taken care of. But I would be lying to you if I didn't say that it is sometimes a hard thing to navigate and balance when you're working with people that are volunteering their time. And now a word from our sponsor. Track hospitality software is powered by Travel Net Solutions and industry leading hospitality company. track is a portfolio software designed specifically with your vacation rental management company in mind. From cloud contact center to property management software, including features such as trust, accounting, maintenance, housekeeping, owner, portal, guest portal, channel distribution, and more. All in one platform, create seamless operations and increase revenue with track to learn more about track hospitality software, visit trackhs.com.

Dana Lubner Going together sounds great to those who want to participate. It looks ​ good on paper. But how do you get those not in your current orbit to join your movement? Eric Bay in New Orleans has developed a really nice kind of messaging that you're free to use.

Eric Bay (ANP) There's one thing that you find or you will find and I think we all ​ have found in industry leaders and industry participants worldwide. And that's passion. Because they believe in what they're hey're doing. They believe in, in their personal hosting story, their home, the creating of memory and experiences. They believe in a business model of generating revenue. So they, their strongest supporter and cheerleader is themselves. It's just a matter of getting them to not be discouraged and saying, hey, collectively, we can do this. If it's just you one person, you're not either gonna have the intuition or the inclination or the desire to go forward. But everybody in this room has that same goal and that same mindset So, collectively, we could do this. And it's important for those who are

too afraid, and for those who are lacking the knowledge or the resources or for your housekeeper, For your gardener or for your maintenance man, so this problem is bigger than you, we need you to join the efforts to make sure that you're helping not only you, but others.

Dana Lubner I love the way that Debbie's work has inspired Megan and Megan has, ​ in-turn inspired many of us. I know, I find inspiration from both of these ladies. And I hope this podcast will inspire you. Part of the way we keep each other going is by making these kinds of connections.

Debi Hertert (Host2Host) We are in the process now of filling three board ​ seats, we've got a number of ways to connect with people and get the word out there. And even still, people are hesitant to participate. And one of the things that we've done this year, we had something planned that didn't actually come to fruition. And that was host teas, we were going to start having a host tea once a month and invite new members and potential members to just a little chat. So that we could get together in someone's home and talk about our businesses and maybe do some explaining, you know, very soft sell for being a member a host. And then the first one was scheduled right after we got closed down. We then decided that we would have virtual coffees. So now we have every Wednesday, we have a virtual coffee. And we have a different host that actually hosts that coffee that session. So we asked the host to come up with some small question to kind of get the conversation going. But it's open to all members. And it creates a communication and a networking that that we weren't able to do before. So the more people we get involved in something as simple as a coffee and a conversation, the more they're willing to actually do some work with us. And we've had people say after the coffee is that they feel that this is a lifeline for them, that they feel so closed off from their normal routines and connections, that this is offering a good deal of emotional support.

Megan McCrea (NASTRA) I don't feel unappreciated. And I don't think most of our ​ board feels unappreciated. However, you know, it's often thankless and that it's just like, Hey, can you help me with this? Can you help me with that. And while they appreciate it, there's always this like, do for me, you know, mentality to a degree. So the people who are getting into this, that we've been talking to, they're in it, because they care. And because they're passionate, and because they want to see change, and they just want to be they want to help the community as a whole. And when you start seeing those changes, and you have those small wins, or big wins, then that's really where your quote unquote, thank you and fulfillment comes in.

Dana Lubner As you may have already picked up this far into the season. A key ​ characteristic or trait to a leadership team is passion, and enthusiasm. And when you're passionate and enthusiastic about something you find energy to devote to it. And what I've found as a common thread, with my own local group and the other group leaders that I've interviewed, is that oftentimes the people that are dedicating themselves to be on a leadership team already have a lot going on their lives. They're already really busy people, but they choose to step up and take on the task and be a part of the mission. Because if they don't, somebody else may not. And so I think it's really important to realize that energy management is an essential factor to be mindful of, you know, Joe ended up stepping out of being the leader of the Mile High hosts, Joe is somebody that is incredibly dedicated and passionate to the task. And he was pouring so much of his time into the organization that I think he was heading towards being burnt out.

Joe Pergolizzi I would come home so frustrated. I took press articles ​ personally. I mean, I'm talking to you all right now and I feel the anger bubbling up whenever something negative would get written in the press, and there's a price to pay for that and I knew that I was gonna burn out.

Dana Lubner So knowing that that's been something that happened to me One of the ​ leaders of our group, I tried to be super mindful about setting parameters, and setting up times in which I know that I can step away from the leadership tasks, so that I can balance and preserve my own well being.

Joe Pergolizzi I did the math, and I realized Personally, I couldn't afford it. ​ Financially, I couldn't afford it. This was my full time job. This is what I was doing, developing, establishing the connections and spending time talking to everybody to try and find out exactly what was going on at the end of the day, and who was responsible and why why excise and license and why all those people felt the way that they felt and what was actually Airbnb stance and how to get to talk to somebody who actually had leverage from Airbnb. And to find out the way the actual way, ordinances were written, all that took a lot of time, and a lot of blood. And I, I just, I just couldn't, both emotionally and financially afford to do it to play anymore at that level.

Matt Landau And Joe, this is Matt, how did you see Dana? Like, how is she cut out for ​ this?

Joe Pergolizzi I see in Dana, someone who has found a vehicle for her own ​ development, someone that is learning someone that's open to learning and understanding policy, I often thought through this entire journey that it was going to be women that were going to help solve this problem, because this is a compromise. This is about listening. Short term rentals do take new thinking. And I feel like there's an attribute to the way women are in a professional environment that lends itself towards solutions.

Dana Lubner What is clear is these groups take time to build and maintain. And as we ​ know, the advocacy fight is hard, and it never stops. You must have passion, you must keep it fresh, and you must have help.

Dana Lubner Our second big takeaway is, in order to go together, these groups have to ​ be set up and run sustainably, or else you're going to burn out, people in the group are going to burn out. And you won't be able to achieve advocacy goals or any other goals. Do you need timelines and frequent meetings with a reliable schedule? At those meetings, you need to plan an agenda so that people know what you're working towards, and what is going to be discussed in the meeting. You need to clearly define roles, responsibilities and leadership. And you need to have tasks that can be delegated or the key players in this group will burn out. It's hard when dealing with volunteers and people just trying to help. But you must have rules. And if people aren't getting the job done, you need to politely thank them and enable somebody else to do it. And ultimately, you have to be thinking in ways that inspire passion for stakeholders and yourself. Because remember, this never stops.

Dana Lubner I should note that money is often a key factor for group survival and ​ success will be devoting all of Episode Five to ways to finance these groups. Matt, I know you have some thoughts on this topic.

Matt Landau Yeah, I just think it's important to remember that there's two kinds ​ of capital we're working with, there's cash, the ability to pay for things. And then

there's the human capital, the supporters and volunteers who are giving us their time. And they're both equally important. And it may sound obvious. But I also think it's worth saying that in our research, we've found all destinations have a different maturity level of their short term rental community. It may be a brand new group that's listening to this podcast and just getting started today. It may be a group like Megan's that's been operating successfully for a number of years. But regardless, no matter where you fall on this maturity scale, these two things, human capital and actual cash the ability to pay for things are directly correlated with your ability to get stuff done.

Dana Lubner Once your host group is organized and running smoothly. In other words, ​ once your internal relationships are calibrated...you want to start designating and encouraging members of your group to form relationships with local businesses, government and anti groups. One of the coolest things about doing this podcast is that it's allowed me the opportunity to pick the brains of some incredibly successful community and advocacy group leaders. And the biggest takeaway I got from my conversation with Claire is about how important it is to have relationships with different members and organizations in your community. I immediately brought that knowledge back to my own group at the my hosts. And we've been working over the last few months on ways that we can help support other groups and other associations and our own community.

Claire Reisweig (GARM) And relationships are key to running a small business ​ and that's what we are we're small businesses. I will say this and it's not to disparage anything going on with national companies, but they cost is not at the table. turnkeys not at the table. Our locals are not seeing these people at the table. They're not contributing money to festivals, or two things going on in Galveston. No one knows who these people are. But they know who GARM is they know who Sand N Sea is... they know us they know stroke, because we're all part of the community. Anywhere you start people will welcome your participation. So one of the things I say to people is choose something you're interested in, if it's arts and culture, look up on the city website, is there a committee and let either your council person or the city contact node, that's what you're interested in serving on. If you are interested in more the business aspect go for the chamber, the chamber you get to meet so many people in so many different businesses. If it is you want to focus on tourism, only go for your Tourism Board and call up and say how do I get involved. And it may be something like show up at our, you know, our beer fest there are mountain Beer Fest, and it's this and we need volunteers, whatever it is, be happy, show up,

smile and then it snowballs from there because they see you as somebody who will show up in once you've got your creds that you're helping in one place, your name gets mentioned for other places your reputation is being built. Another one is just to call your city council member and get to know them, you know, they're willing to talk unless they're a real jerk of the council member, ours are all willing to engage and talk and ours don't care if you're part of their district or not. They engage which is really terrific. The meetings are always streamed, you can keep in touch with them. You can write them notes, they write you back. But that's another important one.

Dana Lubner It's really easy when you don't know someone to make up a story in your ​ mind about what they're like or what they think about a certain topic. And what we've discovered over the last year is that when we took a moment, and sat down at the table with some of the people we looked at as opposition, whether it was somebody that did not want short term rentals in their neighborhood, or a government official that was implementing some element of enforcement or the law is that you often have more things in common with them, then you probably initially thought and when you build a relationship with them, it takes away the hostility that sometimes clouds the ability for you to have a productive and fruitful conversation that works towards goals where everyone's feeling like they're being respected or heard. If the relationship is right. Sometimes these anti groups can even work with short term rental groups to find solutions that work best for everyone. Jessica Black of Mom's Against Short Term Rentals tells us about working with Galveston Associations to fight a state preemption bill.

Jessica Black (Moms Against Short Term Rentals) It was interesting there's a ​ group in Galveston their short term rental Association actually worked with us to fight against the preemption bill because they had worked for years down in Galveston to create their own local ordinance that really worked for the community. And short term rentals are a huge part of their economy. So it wasn't that they didn't want them. But their ordinance allows for certain neighborhoods to be what's called R-Zero, where you can't do any type of short term rental. And that is for the residents that live there that want to have neighbors that want to have community and that's only like four or five neighborhoods, but, you know, it really takes the residential neighborhoods back to what they're supposed to be, but still creating a place where short term rentals work. And to me, I think that is fair. You know, there's a lot of businesses I love, I love Costco, I love Target, I probably wouldn't love them as much if they were operating illegally next to my house. So it's just finding the time in the place where things make sense, I think

you have to work with the community to be sustainable, because you can't just commodify an entire community and have that work long term there has to it has to work for the people that live there.

Dana Lubner While building your own relationships is critical. Having people in the ​ group dedicated to making specific relationships can be powerful. Megan and NASTRA have a dedicated person for relationship building with both local and national businesses.

Megan McCrea (NASTRA) We have a partnership chair, and this is actually a ​ new board position that we've just created. And we're actively looking to fill. And that person is going to be responsible for working with local businesses and national businesses, which is really a two fold approach. So local businesses, how can we be good community partners and send our guests into support those businesses, as hosts, but then also national businesses, like Rent Responsibly, Noiseaware, Price Labs of the world...and how can those people help our hosts? That person, you know, is going to lead that effort, but that doesn't mean they're solely responsible for doing everything either. So that may include forming committees at time for various projects. We had somebody in that position last year, but then they had to resign. And so it's just been kind of sitting there and we haven't really done anything with it. So for instance, when somebody new comes into that role, hopefully what they'll do is a little bit of cleanup, right? Like, we've talked about that person as an initial responsibility reaching out to our existing partners and just saying, How are you doing? Right? Like it's, it's really tough right now. And what can we do? How can we help? Is there anything we can help get the word out about either to our hosts, or to the guests that are still coming?

Dana Lubner Our final big takeaway This episode is once your group is sustainably ​ organized and running, relationships with the local community, anti groups and government are going to make all the difference, someone from your group. Ideally, several people need to be building these relationships.

Dana Lubner Well, listener, the ball is in your court. In Episode One, we had a wake up ​ call. In Episode Two, you learned about the various and unexpected journeys into advocacy. Now you've heard this quote, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far go together. Remember the key takeaways from this episode, which are that it's time to reframe the way you look at competition, build a sustainable host group, and get out there and make connections in your local community and government. The future of short term rentals and your location depends on it. If you'd like advice on a specific problem you're encountering in your host group, feel free to email me at help at Dana loopnet.com. In you may notice that this is a different email address than the first few episodes. And that's because my effortless rental group work inbox was starting to get inundated with emails. But that is a good thing. So keep those emails coming. And I hope that this podcast is also providing some tips and guidance and relief for you as well. We'd like to give a shout out to HomeToGo for helping get the word out. By listing on HomeToGoyou can expand your reach to millions of new customers and capture more bookings while diversifying your revenue streams.

Dana Lubner I'm Dana Lubner. And thank you for listening. Please leave us a review or ​ comment on your platform of choice. Tune in next week for episode 4: The Big Day, where we'll show you step by step how to host an event like the good neighbor summit. Make sure you subscribe today so you don't miss a single episode.

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Ep. 4: The Big Day

Newcaster Action in the form of education with the first of its kind event a good ​ neighbor summit focused on helping renters thrive above a rental code that's the first of its kind in the country. Denver, an overnight destination for almost 20 million visitors in 2017, the capital of a state with a nearly $20 billion tourism industry but a city where people face felony charges for allegedly making false statements on forms about their rental properties and bar codes as you can't rent out a home that's not your primary residence. A rule former council woman Marybeth Sussman was a part of creating that protects us from losing affordable housing. Airbnb hosts hope it's also weeded out the bad eggs in the business tarnishing the reputation of hosts who enjoy the experience to better grow the short term rental industry hosts are focused on educating one another about the laws and conducting business with the community in mind anything to help the reputation of being a good neighbor and being a good thing for our community. Nicole Fierro reporting.

Dana Lubner This is How to Save Your Vacation Rental Business, a 10-part ​ educational series about the do's and don'ts of sustainable short term rentals. This episode is brought to you by Track powered by Travel Net Solutions providing integrated solutions to transform the way vacation rental hospitality works. This is episode for the big day. In this episode, we'll learn how a big event gets everyone on the same page, all the fanfare of putting something like this together and getting the word out and how an event like this can change the narrative. Hello, and welcome to my show. Hey, Matt, how's it going?

Matt Landau It's great. I don't know why we giggle whenever we do these ​ introductions, but I'm really enjoying this podcast series so far. And before we even dive into today's subject matter, would you mind sharing the role of your husband in this series? Because we haven't given him a shout out just yet.

Dana Lubner Yeah, it's quite, um, quite awesome. So my husband, as we talked about ​ in a different interview that we've done together on your show, he is also a musician. So he decided he would throw together a little beat for our show, which is turned into some of the theme music throughout the season.

Matt Landau Let's play that real quick. ​

Matt Landau So that is music that your husband literally created because he's a ​ DJ?

Dana Lubner It's pretty awesome. He feels that excited that he's able to get his 15 ​ seconds of fame on Spotify through my podcast.

Matt Landau Okay, well shout out to Dana's husband for creating this beautiful ​ music I'm sure with this is the only podcast in the vacation rental industry with its own DJ creating music for it. Dana, what are we talking about today?

Dana Lubner Today we're talking about putting on a big event. And for us in Denver, it ​ was the good neighbor summit.

Matt Landau The Good Neighbor summit, for me was a very interesting event ​ because it kind of distilled all of the efforts and the stakeholders that was taking place in Denver into this finite event, what kinds of people were attending?

Dana Lubner It was an opportunity for us to get everyone on the same page. The ​ primary focus of our invite list was the hosting community. But we knew that there were people that supported the hosting community that could also bring value to the conversation. So we invited vendors. And then we also wanted to bring the opposition to the event in a sense of inviting city officials that we didn't feel necessarily had an accurate perception of the host.

Matt Landau Across our research, we've kind of observed There's two tiers to ​ the individuals that you're aiming to get onto the same page. The first and most important tier is, of course, the hosts. We have a fragmented industry, and a lot

of our independent owners and managers are running around completely independent of one another. So there's that tear of getting all of them into one room. And I think Debbie Hertert in Portland with the Host2Host group is a perfect example of that. But then there's this additional tier or layer to this event, which is all the other stakeholders in your region, perhaps there's some neighbors who are not so happy with what's going on. Maybe there's some vendors who are benefiting or being impacted from vacation rentals, maybe it's a destination marketing organization, like we'll talk about later. Maybe it's a local government official, who has some words to share, I think keeping in mind the two layers to the engagement is is a helpful way to begin looking at your invitations. And I'm guessing from the organizers standpoint, it's very hard to achieve anything meaningful without a big event? Is that right? It? Did getting people under one roof, solve things that you couldn't have solved otherwise?

Dana Lubner Yes, that was our main objective. As I've mentioned, in previous ​ episodes, we knew that the narrative needed to be accurately adjusted. And so the goal of putting on a big event was to create our own news

Matt Landau I've always loved the power of proximity, the ability to get people ​ close to one another is almost always the best first step to problem solving, and creating solutions that work for everybody. So I'm guessing that this big event that you hosted last year is going to happen again this year, is it not?

Dana Lubner It is. It's just around the corner, we are doing a second annual Good ​ Neighbor Summit, called the roadmap to recovery.

Matt Landau And this is taking place in one big room where everybody will be ​ crammed up against one another?

Dana Lubner Exactly the opposite. It's going to be a virtual event. ​

Matt Landau Okay, so all of the lessons we're going to go through today really ​ apply to both kinds of events. No, the dynamics are still approximately the same. Whether you're hosting it in person, or virtually?

Dana Lubner Some of the technical stuff will be different. But the overall strategy and ​ objectives and goals, there are the same.

Matt Landau And I'm also very honored to say that I have the chance to attend ​ this year's virtual Good Neighbor Summit.

Dana Lubner Yes, second time's a charm. ​

Dana Lubner So the idea of the good neighbor summit first was born when our core ​ advocacy group got together. As I mentioned, we realized that we couldn't go for our big goals until we accomplished some small feats first. So phase one was about changing the narrative of the hosting community in the city of Denver. And we knew in order to do that, we were going to have to bring everyone together and create our own newsworthy event. I was at home. And I got a call from Joe, Pergolizzi. And he was one of our founding members of our core group of the Mile High Hosts. And he said, "I've got this great idea. We need to create an event like an industry conference of sorts here in the city, where we bring together hosts and educate and talk about best practices, and invite city officials and even get some industry leaders to fly into Denver, and be a part of this event." And of course, Joe is full of these amazing, audacious ideas. And I said, Okay, I'm on board. Let's do it.

Joe Pergolizzi Yeah, the good neighbor summit was an event that promoted ​ exactly what the title states: Good Neighbor practices, a way to acknowledge the different stakeholders, whether it be the neighborhood businesses that benefit from short term rentals, how neighbors can benefit from short term rentals, how the city is benefiting from short term rentals, and how we're all looking for most of the same things, even though at the moment there's a lot of disagreement on how we get there.

Dana Lubner When Joe presented the idea of creating this in person event, I definitely ​ think there was a hesitation amongst some of the members of the group. You know, we were all really busy and dedicating two hours one day a week to our meetings. And the idea of creating an event definitely seemed overwhelming. I was even hesitant myself.

But once we started breaking down what this event could shape up to be, they became a reality.

Joe Pergolizzi I wanted it to be a strong show of professionalism. And I wanted ​ to try and move the conversation, even if it was two millimeters, I wanted it to be on the record, that the narrative that the city was presenting, and that the news media was feeding into because the city had the soapbox, I wanted to put a stake in the ground and show whoever was listening, that there's more to this story, that there's another strong, significant voice. The second goal was to try and give hosts some shelter, some reprieve because what no one really gets is that there are 1000s of people who are who don't have a voice who are sitting at home going, why is it this way? Why can't it be that way? I don't understand why can't we move the needle on this. And there's no vehicle for there's no megaphone, there's no outlet for these people to get involved to have their voice represented, I believe in community. And I believe that if you build it, they will come. And I wanted the host community to at least on my watch, know that there was the possibility that their voices can come together and do something good. So maybe someone attended the good neighbor summit, and they were like, that was really educational, that was great. But what would have been a bigger achievement is if they looked around, and they felt they were part of something, and that they were inspired to create a sense of community amongst themselves.

Dana Lubner I think a really important quality and a leader is to get feedback from ​ other members in the group. But to drive the conversation and show that it's possible to do something that might be to some a bit of an audacious goal. And that's exactly what Joe did.

Joe Pergolizzi Like I said at the the dinner later that night, where we had a ​ bunch of stakeholders after the event, I said, you know, in 10 years, what's gonna matter is the is truly the fabric of the relationships that we've built. We broke bread, we gave blood, we sweated over a common issue in our lives. And we tried to empower we tried to do good, we tried to elevate the conversation, we tried to make a positive impact in our own profession, far beyond the dollar. And I wanted the I wanted the hosts to know that they could be more than just themselves sitting in their home wondering what to do.

Matt Landau Is the Good Neighbor Summit, a topic that people seem to reach ​ out to you about? Has it acted as an anchor or like a lighthouse? In any way?

Dana Lubner Yeah, the Good Neighbor Summit is something that I feel often gets ​ referenced, because it was the way for individuals that were operating in kind of a, you know, fragmented manner, to come together and really show the power of the intention behind putting together an event that not only educates and benefits the community at its core, but also the ripple effect it can have to those that kind of circulate outside of the hosting community.

Matt Landau Yeah, I love that. And to me, it's really embodies the proactive and ​ professional nature of this entire podcast series, which is we must organize and address problems in a formal way as opposed to just assuming that they are going to resolve themselves so I can see how hosting a big event puts all of your effort into a nice package that's presentable to the general public.

Dana Lubner I would recommend that every destination do a consideration of throwing ​ their own good neighbor summit. I think a lot of people that are local, whether they're a vendor that supports the community or a neighbor that doesn't like living next door to A short term rental could really benefit from seeing a good neighbor summit within their own community.

Matt Landau There's something about the the vibes when you proactively host, ​ a problem solving event that draws I think, good people, or at least draws the right intentions.

Dana Lubner Our first big takeaway is a big event gets everyone onto the same page, ​ literally and figuratively. For a fragmented industry, like vacation rentals, the power of a big event lies in getting all of the desperate players into one room, be it virtual or otherwise, this act in itself, even if your event doesn't succeed, how you imagined has connective and unifying effects that will last far beyond the scheduling itself. The first bit of business we had to accomplish was figuring out what date we would set for this event. December is a really hard month to host an event. So we landed on November, we literally had six weeks to plan this event. order to pull this off, we needed all hands on deck with everyone pitching in. The approach that we took when planning out the good neighbor summit was a divide and conquer, we knew that one person alone could not carry this weight on their shoulders, it was helpful that each member of our group brought a different set of experiences to the planning effort. We have some members of our core group that are familiar with event planning. So they took on the task of finding a venue. There are some similar, like sharing economy websites for events that we looked at. And none of them really seemed like the best fit. They were also pretty expensive. Which leads me to the topic of how are we going to fund this event, based on past experiences from members in our group sponsorship is the way we see conferences typically funded. Isn't that right, Matt?

Matt Landau Yes, indeed is, in fact, every vacation rental conference that I've ​ ever attended, has a handful of sponsors that are helping cover the cost, because otherwise, it's extremely expensive to put on something like that. And it's also important not to view charging for an event, or getting sponsors as a bad thing. In fact, if we look at it, like any business that we want to survive, there are costs involved. And for the costs that we can't get covered as gifts, or donations or volunteer work. We need money to pay for these things. And somebody who has experienced that firsthand is Debbie with her event in Portland.

Debi Hertert (Host2Host) We needed to at least break even and we wanted to ​ make a little bit of money. Because what happened when I asked these people about whether or not they thought we had the the skill etc to put on a conference was we want to make enough money so that we can have a conference next year. I mean, they didn't even answer the direct question. It was like, we want to make sure that this is going to I mean, obviously they just really liked the idea. So we wanted to make a little bit of money to put down a down payment on a venue for the next year. So I think we ended up charging, thinking it was $65 for attendance. We wanted to keep it small enough so that the single local home sharing host could afford to go and then we charged I think $100 or $120 for vendor tables. Oh, it's great.

Matt Landau And in my experience, these companies that are providing products and ​ services in our industry, they are really excited about getting in front of serious passionate vacation rental professionals, they will pay money to have that kind of exposure. And so Dana, how did you actually approach your sponsors?

Dana Lubner We immediately reached out to those service providers that we ​ personally use as hosts. So we contacted Airdna, we contacted Proper Insurance. We reached out to Autohost to find out if they would be interested in being a sponsor of the event. Those conversations ended up leading to them becoming speakers and participants in the event itself. I had Dave Krauss of Rent Responsibly on my radar and somebody I had felt was very inspirational for the advocacy movement. And so we got him on the line. And I recall the day and conversation quite clearly. We were going through What our big, audacious event plan was, and Dave interrupted us. And he just had to say, "guys, I am blown away by how much you already have planned out the detail, the timing, the breakout sessions, the attendance, the agenda, and so forth." And he was so pumped up to be a part of the event, and said an enthusiastic yes to helping out with sponsorship.

David Krauss (Rent Responsibly) Rent Responsibly is not even focused on ​ the future of short term rentals. First, we're focused on that second, what we're focused on first, and I don't know of any other organization in our space that has made this so abundantly bold face typing, we want sustainability within the broader community, which means our activities have to benefit the broader community. Otherwise, it's an unsustainable balance. So what does that mean? That means that at times, if there are real community concerns, that short term rentals are having a impact that nobody wants to see for whatever that may be. And that's up to the local community, it's not up to you, or if then maybe we have to support things that the broader community wants.

Dana Lubner Once we are able to confirm some sponsors for the event, we really had ​ to focus on the location. Because while we did pick a date, if we didn't have a location that could change everything. And this is when we found out how much we have to rely on the members of the group for their support. So when you think about your advocacy group, they have a lot of other areas that they're most likely involved with within the community. And so one of the members of our group was very close to the artists community, and we ended up landing on a gallery as the location for our event. It was the last place we thought we would host our event, but it ended up being the perfect location. And if it wasn't for reaching out to the members of our group and asking for their help, we would have never stumbled upon that location.

Matt Landau Did you consider doing it in a vacation rental property? Because ​ surely there was plenty of those represented, right?

Dana Lubner The idea was there but we knew we wanted the attendance of this event ​ to be larger than what a vacation rental property could hold. And so we were thinking somewhere around 150 to 200 people in one room would have been really challenging in a vacation rental home.

Matt Landau And all the neighbors would have been like, "Oh, it's a party Airbnb party ​ house."

Dana Lubner Exactly. That was the opposite direction of what we were trying to ​ accomplish. Debbie herder from host to host leveraged her network to find a good cheap location. With a strategic bonus to boot.

Debi Hertert (Host2Host) We chose the location because one of our hosts ​ husband was on the staff at OCOM, which is the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine. And they had the classrooms we needed, they had a large auditorium where we could have our breakouts, they had a place where we could put some food, although we didn't do much food. And it was right across the street from the Airbnb headquarters. So we had all of these classrooms, and plenty of support from the place, it was fairly cheap. I think it was just like a couple 100 bucks to rent it for the day. And then afterwards, Airbnb invited us over for, for happy hour, and tours.

Dana Lubner When we landed upon the event space, we got a really great deal. The ​ event space is called the space annex, we had to consider things like parking, and accessibility, and make sure that there was no art installation that we were going to have to worry about navigating around while we were taking over the space for the day, when we started to come down to the details of the agenda, would we feed people at this event would be not? Would we serve alcohol, would we not would be charged for the actual event. A lot of these details were fleshed out during our weekly meetings. And we found out there are opportunities to get businesses involved, as well as our vendors that we use within the community.

Matt Landau So how'd you come up with the price for the event? ​

Dana Lubner We wanted to make it affordable for everyone. And we also wanted to ​ drive value. So the event was market at $25 a ticket. We weren't sure if we were going to have 500 people in attendance or 50. It was really unknown.

Matt Landau Did you consider making it free? ​

Dana Lubner Because of how impressive we were trying to make this event, we really ​ didn't consider making it free, we knew that we had to rent chairs, we had to rent tables, we decided upon serving pizza and getting a keg of beer. We were serving snacks, we had to rent a PA system, there were just too many things involved with how impressive of an event we were hoping to accomplish. That didn't really allow for us to create a free event and carry the financial burden of it entirely upon our sponsors and ourselves.

Matt Landau So you want it to do it? Right? ​

Dana Lubner Exactly. ​

Joe Pergolizzi It's better to have a great event with small capacity than a big ​ event that's chaos. Maybe your goal is only 50 people, it's better to have a waitlist than rent out a place that holds 1000 people and you only get 100. You know, give yourself a win.

Dana Lubner I think that's when I first reached out to you, Matt. ​

Matt Landau Yeah, so I got an email from you. Right? And it said, We'd like you ​ to come and speak at our conference.

Dana Lubner I've been hearing about this Matt Landau guy, and thought he would be ​ perfect for the event. And yeah, I hit you up and said, Can you come speak at our event, only to find out that you were a bit out of our budget?

Matt Landau Well, and I was very flattered, and I will share with our listeners ​ that as part of my business, I do speaking engagements where I get up in front of groups or conferences or entire associations and share research and findings. And so that was part of my business plan. But I also found myself, because we were also filming the show at the time, that I was needing to be a little bit more selective about the kinds of jobs that I was taking just because of the amount of work that goes into it. So I think I respectfully said that I was not able to was that right? Or was I just terrible about it?

Dana Lubner You were very gracious about it. And you even offered to be available to ​ help me flesh out any of our scheduling or our the agenda that we had planned for the day.

Matt Landau Yeah, so I would actually encourage anybody who's listening to ​ reach out to industry leaders, and sometimes they will be able to make it and sometimes they won't, but there's no harm in trying. In fact, Dana, that was the start of our great friendship, I remember the next time you confronted me about it, we were having a drink in New Orleans.

Dana Lubner Exactly, exactly, then that's sort of my MO: I love the idea of reaching out ​ to people, whether it's in our industry, or outside of our industry to ask for help, because I think you don't get what you don't ask for. And if you don't ask, we wouldn't have been able to, to have the speaker lineup that we ended up having for our event.

Joe Pergolizzi So we had speakers representing mediation services, we had ​ professionals, professional service, people help elevate the guest experience. And we had a panel of industry people talking about the future of short term rentals and policy and where that was going when insurance companies.

Matt Landau Think outside of vacation rentals, like people in the hospitality ​ sector, people in food, people in tech, there's a lot of great minds around and asking them to come and share a little bit of their wisdom with the vacation rental community. I think that adds texture to our colleague's understandings.

Dana Lubner That was part of what we put into the event itself. So everyone that was ​ at the good neighbor summit, as a featured speaker was not necessarily in the industry. You know, we really had to look at what were the negative narratives? And what was the story circulating about bad host behavior that we could address at this one day event. And that's when we decided to say "hey, let's bring up conflict resolution individual to the agenda, we heard that there were upset neighbors and hosts that were not being upfront about the fact that they were short term renting their home while they were gone." And so the city offered a free service and continues to offers that service. And so we had the individual from the organization come and speak about what it is like to have a conversation that you maybe are not necessarily upfront and comfortable with at first. And now a word from our sponsor.

Dana Lubner Track Hospitality Software is powered by Travel Net Solutions an ​ industry leading hospitality company. Track is a portfolio software designed specifically with your vacation rental management company in mind. From cloud contact center to property management software, including features such as trust accounting, maintenance, housekeeping, owner portal, guest portal channel distribution and more. All in one platform, create seamless operations and increase revenue with track. To learn more about track hospitality software, visit trackhs.com.

Joe Pergolizzi Be concise, have three or four segments tops, be focused about ​ what those segments are going to be. Have speakers, have experts present subject matters. If this is your first event, make sure you're presenting the entire environment in as much of an objective way as possible. You don't want this necessarily to be, you know, a pro short term rental rally. You want it to be maybe an educational event. So you can welcome in people who might have a different perspective than you.

Dana Lubner This is Joe Pergolizzi. Again, the mind behind our Good Neighbor ​ Summit.

Joe Pergolizzi If you have favorable regulations and this isn't necessarily a ​ group that's trying to change regulations, then your goal would be to build community. So if you're building community, then then those three or four segments might look a little bit different. Maybe you're trying to come up with creative ways on how people can connect to local businesses, maybe you have

some calls to action that involve further mobilization to bring businesses and short term rentals closer together. Or maybe you have a small committee form a small committee at an event like that, that's doing neighborhood outreach, or neighborhood cleanup, or doing a fundraiser for that matter. So first, maybe just decide what kind of outcomes are looking for? Is this an advocacy push for policy? Or is this a community building event? Build your presentation, over three or four segments, polish it, have food, you know, sugars, so people stay engaged? Invite the stakeholders. You know, don't be intimidated. The first one was a lot for us. But I bet you we could probably do the same event in half the amount of time now that we did it once.

Dana Lubner So when planning the event, we really wanted to bring a voice back to ​ the conversation that was there when the debate was short term rentals in the city of Denver were quite heated. It was the time in which they were currently illegal. And we are trying to figure out what exactly our ordinance language would require. And so we invited former council woman, Marybeth Sussman, to join in our panel discussion at the end of the event. And getting her to agree to participate was not as challenging as one might think it was simply reaching out to her, telling her about what we were putting together, and then asking her to meet us for some coffee. The cool thing about reaching out to your city representatives is that their email addresses or their aides, email addresses or public information to members of our core group got together and introduced ourselves and shared with her what the purpose of this event was. And she was enthusiastic to participate and ended up kind of stealing the show in a lot of ways. She was bringing a lot of humor to a situation that I think the hosting community had felt quite tense about, and was great to have a voice that was part of the conversation three years prior at the table for the event.

Alex Lawson When I go in and I meet with an elected official or a reporter that's ​ covering this issue, it's important to share with them my perspective: to share with them the facts to share with them. The stories of property managers in their community. That's how you build a relationship is by caring about them. And by sharing with them your perspective, your understanding, and your lens on the world and on this issue set. And then once you show them that you care about them you care about their concerns or the concerns of their constituency. Usually you share your information, your knowledge, your expertise, your background. And this is critically important for property managers. I can't tell you how many times I've gone in with property managers to meet with city council members. And I've said two sentences, because the entire conversation is the city council member asking about the property managers business, how many people they

employ? How many? How long they've been in the industry? What type of travelers come to the community? Where do the travelers go to get coffee? So sharing is the second thing. And then last is the ask, you got to make an ask. It's always okay to make an ask of an elected official. That's what you're there for. That's what they're there for.

Dana Lubner That was Phil from Expedia, with real wisdom on talking to government ​ officials.

Matt Landau What other kinds of personalities would you include? In an event ​ like if somebody's listening to this, what kinds of people should they be thinking specifically like positions and or stakeholders represented?

Dana Lubner So I think it's really important to bring the voice of your DMO (your ​ destination marketing organization) to the table, so we invited Visit Denver. And not only was the woman incredibly enthusiastic and animated, she shared some pretty impressive stats about tourism activity in our city, some of the featured attractions, a lot of things that we take for granted as being locals within our own community. That gives us a little bit of zest and excitement to share all of those different reasons that people will come to Denver with our guests. So that was a really great, exciting voice to have, as well as an individual from Eat Denver. So an area which a lot of people that are coming to a city will spend their time is going to be at restaurants and bars and breweries. And so having a voice of somebody to speak to all of the great restaurants and cuisine that our city provides was another way of getting hosts jazzed and excited about our city and the future of what we can do to offer great things, two guests that are coming to town.

Debi Hertert (Host2Host) We had so much wisdom in our community that it ​ was very recognizable that our industry was still fairly unformed. I wanted to take that information and the wisdom that we had and share it, you know, kind of across the board, I did not want a platform or a vendor, or big bucks, really trying to control any of the kind of things that we were talking about or who was going to be speaking.

Debi Hertert (Host2Host) And so we did ask for some keynote speakers. And ​ we had Tavel Portland represented. And by that, by that time, I had some contacts with the Airbnb office. And we got a couple of Airbnb keynote speakers. But essentially, the the, the reason that we call it host to host is because that's really what we are. And we were there to support each other and to share with each other. And so all of the 23 breakout sessions that we had was way too many, but they were all designed to allow us to highlight places of interest that we had in our businesses.

Dana Lubner The agenda was planned, and we landed on a ticket price of $25, where ​ we felt like there was enough value we were providing with the event, as well as the price point being manageable. For a majority of the hosting community. We landed on a date we would landed on a location everything was moving along very quickly. The selling of the event was promoted both on Facebook as well as Eventbrite. We boosted a couple posts on Facebook, which is very, very cheap, especially when you're targeting a small location, geographic location. We reached out to the OTAs, both Airbnb and vrbo, and asked them to send out a blast to a handful of hosts as well, which ended up providing some increase in ticket sales.

Dana Lubner I would say we were quite nervous a couple of weeks prior to the event ​ because we didn't quite have as many tickets sold as we were hoping. But it was like most events those last five days right before the event where we saw a majority of those ticket sales take place. So we sold out, which was pretty exciting. And the event was a seated event and there was also a handful of people in attendance standing in the back of the room. The room was packed, the energy was high And I'd say, blew our expectations out of the water from start to finish of what we were hoping to accomplish. And we heard that same feedback, we sent out a guest survey after. And we asked everyone that was in attendance to share their feedback on the event. And we got raving reviews from pretty much everybody that was there, there was some really great feedback that we will take into our, our feature events that we put on. But it was definitely received really well. And people felt like they got something out of the event, which was what we were hoping to accomplish.

Dana Lubner Our second big takeaway is a big event needs fanfare, planning, ​ reaching out to all of your local contacts, cashing in on favors: getting creative with ways to provide value to your stakeholders, and above all, promoting the hell out of it. The goal is to get as many people as possible into one room, organizing a big event also galvanizes your group. You've got to pay for these things. Don't be afraid of sponsorship. But don't let sponsorship takeover?

Joe Pergolizzi I think it created the opening for a seat at the table. Did it give us ​ a seat at the table? No. Did it create the opening? Yes. Did the work that you did. Susan did David did (following the event) get us to where we want it to go? Yeah, it did. Did we get the media coverage? Yeah, we got media coverage. We got I think on three different television stations. I don't believe I don't know for sure if we and we had press we had printed press there. So we created the buzz through the media on television, we got a few interviews, we did get a seat at the table, we got recognition from excise and license that a group of hosts did something responsibly. And they did make public comments about that.

Dana Lubner A big part of the success of the good neighbor summit came from the ​ story told in the media to make sure we maximize our coverage, I consulted with my good friend Alex Lawson, who's a master at strategic communication. We'll be hearing a lot more from him in episode six and seven, as we learn all about communicating our stories and interacting with the media.

Alex Lawson The system is rigged right now against people who are working ​ hard every day, following the rules, doing the best that they can, but still seemingly sliding backwards away from what I think we all see as the American dream. And the problem is that too much of the infrastructure, and the stories are controlled by the people with the money. And so when you control the story, you really are writing the future. So if you're convincing everybody that no matter what, you will never see the change that you want. So just go ahead and give up. If people believe that they won't fight for the change that they want, they won't fight to ensure that the systems like social security that we all pay into are going to be there for us and actually work better for us. So I think that's sort of the route of advocacy, my own history, and it is sort of long of how I got there. But it is always based on this really clear piece of knowledge that is the most fundamentally powerful piece, which is the power of story and of controlling our own story, that when you can tell your own story. That is when you can become powerful.

Dana Lubner Putting on the Good Neighbor Summit, put our advocacy efforts on the ​ map, not only internally within the hosting community, but with a former city council woman and with the city officials that were there in attendance. It was quite the memorable shift. There was a strong polarity of us versus them with our relationship in the city. And at these every other month STRAC meetings that completely shifted. At the next strike meeting that we had, we were referenced as some of the local news that was happening in our community. And we were given applause and praise about how well and how professionally the event was pulled off. It really formalized our efforts and brought all of us together in a room where we had a chance to step away from being behind our computers and being participants in a Facebook group, and really get a chance to meet people and share our stories with each other from our local community.

Matt Landau And I would just like to add that as a complete outsider, to your ​ Denver work, Dana, the good neighbor summit to me, acted as a real milestone event that stopped a bad behavior. And oftentimes, we think of this kind of intervention. Almost like with somebody who is addicted to drugs, for instance, or alcohol, and intervention is a singular event with all the core stakeholders designed to stop a bad behavior. In this case, the bad behavior was no collaboration, or teamwork, or effort to be more responsible as a group. And by having an intervening event, setting a tone, inviting all the right individuals doing so professionally. It really begins the the next chapter, it acts as this kind of timeline event that changes everything. So as a completely unbiased person in the industry, I see these kinds of events as moments that define the future of any given destination.

Dana Lubner Our final big takeaway is -- a big event changes the narrative. It holds ​ the power to kickstart a new group's momentum to restart in existing groups dynamic, and to make a significant impact in local press. It has the power to change perception in a way that lots of little events cannot.

Dana Lubner In Episode One, we had a wake up call. In Episode Two, you heard about ​ the various and unexpected journeys into advocacy. And Episode Three, we learned you'll go further when you go together. And in this episode, we learned about how a big event gets everyone onto the same page. It needs fanfare, but it has the power to change the narrative -- narratives drive policy and that's what we need to pay attention to. So we can be a positive conduit for fair regulations.

Dana Lubner Okay, listener now it's on your shoulders. When can you host your next ​ big event? Who will you invite? How much will you charge? What speakers will share wisdom? What rivals deserve to be invited? What press outlets would appreciate covering the story? A big landmark event is one of the best ways to unite fragmented voices. Are you ready to start your narrative shifts? If you're thinking about hosting an event, feel free to email me with any questions at help. At [email protected] we want to give a shout out to Beyond Pricing for helping us get the word out. Beyond Pricing is the world's leading revenue management software for vacation rental owners and managers. dynamic pricing is like regulations. You want to make sure you're aware of what's happening in your region and use that information to make better decisions.

Dana Lubner I'm Dana Lubner. And thank you for listening. Please leave us a review ​ or comment on your platform of choice. Stay tuned for our next episode -- "cash money" -- where we'll do a deep dive on how to pay for your host group events in your greater advocacy efforts. Make sure you subscribe today so you don't miss a single episode.

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Ep. 5: Money

Eric Bay (ANP) Every six months we'll do a advocacy and legal and fundraising ​ campaign. In order to build to build up the coffers. you settle or resolve whatever it is first, and a lawsuit the last place you go, a lot of people just think, oh, lawsuits really easy. We just hire a lawyer lawyer takes care of all the problems. But as soon as you start a lawsuit, you're talking about multiple years, and probably hundreds of 1000s of dollars.

Claire Reisweig (GARM) So it's a per property, we pay it, we have a ​ bookkeeper and that money is drawn down on all year long. So you could say we're paying fees, but that's, that's what we pay it all goes to services, we have a very carefully created budget.

Dana Lubner From my friends at VRM B communities. This is How to Save Your ​ Vacation Rental Business, a 10 part educational series about the do's and don'ts of sustainable short term rentals. This episode is brought to you by Track powered by Travel Net Solutions, providing integrated solutions to transform the way vacation rental hospitality works. This is Episode Five: Money. In this episode, we'll learn how to run your host organization like a business to keep it sustainable, how to use grassroots funding to stay independent and when to start collecting money.

Matt Landau Dana Lubner ​

Dana Lubner Matt Landau ​

Matt Landau Halloween's coming up What are you dressing as? ​

Dana Lubner I'm probably I mean, sadly, our Pisces party got canceled because that's ​ when COVID struck land. And so I've got this pretty cool robot costume I might do. But I'm okay. I might just end up in some leggings, like I live in all day these days. Anyway, what about yourself?

Matt Landau Yeah, well, to be honest, I hadn't thought too much about it until I ​ showed up on a webinar yesterday wearing this new kimono that I purchased. And the way that the webcam is framed. It made it look almost like I was wearing a bathrobe. Yeah, but somebody on the call said that it reminded them of Princess Leia. And then they suggested I go as Princess Leia for Halloween. So that's about the closest that I've got. At this point.

Dana Lubner I think you could get a Princess Leia probably somewhere down there in ​ Miami a wig? Like pretty damn quick. So I vote Princess Leia.

Matt Landau I'll tell you what, we could also go as: the episode theme for ​ today's show. And what is that?

Dana Lubner Today's topic is money, which I think sometimes gets a bad rap. And it's ​ often something that carries a bit of a stigma. But I think that's all the more of a reason why we need to talk about it.

Matt Landau I think money is so important. I used to think it was the worst thing ​ in the world. I used to fight to distance myself from appearing to be too concerned about money. But over the years of my vacation rental experience, I started to see that you need the money in order to do everything else. And if you haven't figured out something, some kind of money solution to fuel your business or your passion or whatever it is. Your business or passion will be no more. So when I Dana asked you what we were going to talk about in this deep, big subject of money. I actually gave you a challenge. Did I not?

Dana Lubner You sure did. And it was something I was not excited to do on the onset. ​ But now as we're talking I'm pretty happy to have taken that challenge.

Matt Landau And the challenge was basically, Dana, we have realized that ​ money is a very complicated variable in this advocacy and community building

world. What are you doing about money in Denver with your Mile High Hosts? How are you figuring it out and I'm getting curious what you came up with?

Dana Lubner So the reality here in Denver, as we're sitting here, states apart recording ​ this episode is that we do not currently charge our members monthly or yearly membership dues. And that was something that I think became more apparent to me as I had an opportunity to connect with different community leaders around the country and finding out how they were running their community groups. And I spoke with Meghan in great detail about how NASA finances their group.

Megan McCrea (NASTRA) Compared to other host organizations and advocacy ​ groups, our membership fees are much higher, we realized very quickly, we were never going to be able to pay our attorney at the rates that we used to have. So we brought them up, but then we introduced a monthly option for billing. And that was something that Elise RVP was able to help us build out. So we connected our website, which we use Squarespace to stripe, so it's automatic. So I don’t have to chase down billing every month, either memberships are annual or monthly, we operated it in the red for really up until middle of last year, I think we were always in debt. So we're now in the black. Yay. Which is why we're able to talk about things like an executive director. But that was really kind of what helped us get there. In addition to just rallying donations.

Matt Landau Without membership dues, you had no real income, you were ​ doing everything, either volunteer or money out of your own pocket.

Dana Lubner The reality -- if we didn't have enough of a need for it, we would just ​ forego it. And I think that it allows for you to be resourceful, but it kind of limits your reach in certain ways.

Matt Landau And so you weren't charging dues which I interpret - correct me if ​ I'm wrong - as kind of regular subscription or recurring money. Were you accepting financial donations from members? Or was it completely no money trading hands?

Dana Lubner I mean, if a member came to me and offered a financial donation, I was ​ by no means saying no. But that just didn't happen. Because I don't think we set the foundation of that being part of how you support the efforts that the Mile High Hosts are putting into the community. And so when did you run into an issue?

Matt Landau I mean, was there a timeline moment, which you realize, like, ​ okay, we don't have the financial might to pay for this?

Dana Lubner Yeah, I think, you know, there's been a handful of different instances. ​ And like I said, getting resourceful and asking people, Hey, does somebody have this that we could use? Or does the community member want to donate a certain skill for the greater good, but that can slow down the process. And that can also make the outcome less controllable, because you're at the mercy of somebody else that you're asking for them to donate their services. You know, I'd say, last year at the good neighbor summit was one of the prime examples. We knew we needed money to put on the event. But we didn't have a little, you know, Kitty, with money. We were able to pull from to put on the event and the manner in which we wanted to, which led us to lead you know, the idea of charging a ticket fee.

Matt Landau When you say Kitty -- is that what is a kitty? ​

Dana Lubner I think it's like, I have something I may have learned in another country. I ​ don't know where.

Matt Landau Okay, I just wanted to clarify that. So that brings you up to today. ​ And back to my challenge. What have you decided for your own Mile High hosts situation? What Dana, after listening to all these amazing interviews and talking with all these other advocacy Avengers who have been through this before, what is your synthesis? What is your conclusion for the best route to begin addressing money within Denver's Mile High Hosts?

Dana Lubner Well, if we can get a Drumroll, please. ​

Dana Lubner After this exercise that I challenged myself with today, it's become quite ​ apparent to me that charging members that are benefiting from the offerings and services that the Mile High Host community is producing is only going to help us in ways way beyond what I at first had initially anticipated, and I did an exercise, I opened up a Google doc and I wrote out five headers, and bolded each one of those headers and made it made bullets underneath them and listed out all the pros and cons, including my fears and hesitations. And what I was struggling with around this often taboo topic of money, and realize that the value that we are currently providing today, to the hosting community here in Denver, far outweighs everything I was thinking was a hesitation or reason as to not charge. And the things I felt that I was maybe not providing as a value or service in order to be able to ask people for money, were so much less significant than the than the values that we are currently providing to our members.

Matt Landau I absolutely love where you have just taken us. And is it fair to say ​ that a lot of short term rental groups are already providing real value to their members, their stakeholders? without even really realizing it? Like, can you give us an example of what would be an example of that with the Mile High hosts?

Dana Lubner As you and I have chatted about before, it's easy to underestimate the ​ value that you bring, whether it's a personal relationship, work, relationship or community relationship. And so when I started listing out what we actually bring as value to our community, like, for example, something we've been working on since COVID hit is the idea of the secondary license type that would allow for unlimited amount of non primary residence property owners to rent their properties, and understanding how that would be a significant change in the hosting environment, the guest experience in Denver, and this pugilistic stance between short term rental hosts and angry neighbors. That is so much value and an economic like relief of, of everything that people have been going through during this crisis. Nobody even knows until we have our good neighbor summit, which I guess is full probably be blowing the cover, that that's something we've been working on now for the last six months.

Matt Landau Does that mean that you are going to begin articulating exactly ​ what the values that are being brought to the members are? And asking these members for a recurring membership?

Dana Lubner With your help? That is a yes. ​

Matt Landau I like that, and a recurring membership as in dues, which would be ​ different from any of the other kind of financial support? Or is that the main way?

Dana Lubner I envisioned it as like membership dues like monthly dues, you know, ​ and each time you're presented with that landing page, it highlights all the benefits that you get. And I'm excited also, because I think it challenges our hosting group, especially our leadership team, to create more deliverables that we probably have right in our back pocket that we don't even realize we could produce, which Think about it, it's only going to further benefit the hosting community to better equip them with the skills and knowledge and how they could be showing up in a more professional way, or creating a better guest experience. Or let's talk about it, that dirty word, making more money.

Matt Landau What I absolutely love about that, especially as it relates to your ​ group there is that when you guys, as leaders do something, you do it extremely well, I can tell you're just that kind of person, when you're going to do something, you're going to do it properly. And that oftentimes can wear you down because you're putting so much effort into an initiative in this case that had no financial support. But what I think bringing in this new my financial element does for you guys, is it almost put the ball back in your court. It's like okay, we now have some money to work with. How do we do this properly? How do we make this money go because you're not going to take advantage of money you're going to be so thoughtful with it. It almost for me, flips it back to you and says okay, guys, now show us how our in our group can really make a difference.

Dana Lubner That's part of what scares me is that level of it. Anything I put my name ​ on, as you said, I want to do it with excellence and integrity, and just blow it out of the water. That's, that's how I am in my personal life and how I am in my professional life. And that's how our group has showed up. And so that is, I think, honestly, part of my hesitation, is that it does put more onus on me, but I don't think that that's a bad thing. And it's, and when I say me, I mean, our group and our community. Because in all of this, I am learning how to be a better delegator and sharing the load with others and knowing how to feel more empowered to ask for help. But yes, I love the fact that it puts the onus on us.

Matt Landau And I also love that introducing an income stream for lack of a ​ better phrase, like a business now gives you a little bit of runway, so now you have some resources to work with. And it all of a sudden, means you can maybe begin assigning values to things that are otherwise donated, let's say, somebody has been donating, I don't know what something that's currently donated, that really deserves a financial value.

Dana Lubner And when we've asked members to do some graphic designs, or some ​ short video.

Matt Landau Perfect example, perfect example, because if that person were to ​ disappear, you would need to have some resources in order to find somebody new to do it. So I just love how it takes everything from the informal to the formal, collaborative or professional setting. And do you feel bad about actually trying to create a revenue stream here?

Dana Lubner I mean, I think at first I did. But it was quickly forgotten when I started ​ running the promotional campaigns for our good neighbor summit and put buying some Facebook ads and paying for a Zoom webinar account. And all of the little things that start adding up even for a virtual event. I was like, You know what, this makes sense that we need to subsidize these expenses. And it just makes the process less of a, you know, more, I'd say less of a no brainer.

Matt Landau And I think one of the interesting layers that we get into in today's ​ episode is creating an organization that has an income but also being ready in case your destination needs to fight, you need to hire a lobbyist, you need to purchase an economic impact study these things cost real money. and building a bit of a war chest at least having this in income to me makes for a more sustainable organization as well. Because what are you going to do? If that happens in you have nothing? Right?

Dana Lubner Totally. And I think about the people that look back on regulatory fights ​ that they've lost. And, you know, I know that sometimes there's going to be regret or I wishes or if we could have, and I want to make sure that our community is equipped to be able to enlist services from experts that can maybe really help us be positioned more strongly. versus being like, Oh, well, we have no money. So we didn't get any, you know, consultative advice on X, Y, or Z. And then we find ourselves not being able to, you know, fight back or to speak up. Peach teal, from on the water in Maine, has a relatively small group. But group dues and organized finances have allowed them to hire a lobbyist, which has helped them stay on top of Maine's regulatory landscape.

Paige Teel (NEVRP) For us, obviously, we're nonprofit, we're very small, small ​ organization in the state, she only showing charges us $3,000 a year. And again, it's really just letting us know what happens with legislation. And then we kind of, she'll say, draft this do this, we'll get all the work together, she kind of finalizes it and then goes on our behalf. So there's very much of kind of alert, you guys do the work, I'll look it over, make sure it's good, you know, touch on these three points, and then she goes and presents it so I feel like we've definitely gotten lucky as far as the cost and I do know she does it obviously because of of our newness in the legislation, I guess for lack of you know that that's she's kind of doing it as a little bit of a favor but also recognizing how important it is to our our tourism industry.

Matt Landau So I think a lot of this has to do with what kind of organization one ​ is building, whether it's a nonprofit that needs to generate revenue in order to cover Basic costs, or you're actually looking to raise money in the form of a war chest. Dana, what is your viewpoint on? modeling? Or what kind of organization do you feel comfortable building?

Dana Lubner Well the kind of organization I feel comfortable building is one that's ​ running at a profit. I mean that the initial goal was not to make money, when running, or creating the Mile High Hosts, it was to provide value. But once we start getting into a cadence, and we realize the possibility and the impact that we can have, we realized that you do need money to help support those initiatives.

Matt Landau And one of the things I learned from my mentor, is that if you're not ​ operating at a profit, doesn't matter how much you'd like that business, or how much you care about that cause you simply don't have the resources to be able to continue doing it. It's like if you're not putting the money first, from a sustainability standpoint, the the rest is for not.

Dana Lubner I think it's it's something that people assume, if you have a business that ​ runs at a profit, there's, I don't know, maybe people don't assume this, but I kind of looked at it as though like, Is there some element of mis-focus or misappropriation of goals. And the reality is that it helps with the sustainability of that business, in order for it to run a profit. I mean, you wouldn't be running your short term rental vacation rental business, if you were just breaking even, there needs to be a profit or losing money. Our first big takeaway is that you have to run your host organization like a business and generate profit, or it won't be sustainable. This is where I can also tie it back to the reality is ordinances change and regulations are not set in stone. So the idea of having that kitty of money at your side, so that whenever something does come up in a regulatory setting that you're able to act, whether it's hiring legal counsel, or paying for somebody to help with organizing a group to jump up and into action.

Matt Landau Dana, do you remember the personal trainer analogy that you ​ shared with me?

Dana Lubner The reality is that money holds you accountable. Think of this like getting ​ in shape. When you pay a physical trainer or a personal trainer, to whip you into shape, the outcomes are so much more in your favor, because you know, you've just invested in your future and in that trainer, and so I think it relates back to anything that we pay a monthly subscription fee for. I mean, I don't know about you, but I'm mindful of where I have reoccurring billing. And I also am making sure that I'm utilizing those services and tapping into that value to make sure I'm getting that return. So I think that's the same idea with a lot of people today that are, are hopefully understanding where they're spending their reoccurring funds at.

Matt Landau I think it's also helpful to look at that through other potential ways ​ an organization could generate an income. So you've nicely put your finger on the fact that members will treat something more seriously if they are perceiving value in it, as opposed to it being a free service. But there's also the flip side, that an organization could potentially go to a big corporation, right? You have had sponsors at your events, those corporations have an interest there too, right? There's a vested interest that gives the event organization some influence, no?

Dana Lubner You're totally right. And that's why I think being upfront about what that ​ actually looks like is really important.

Dana Lubner And now a word from our sponsor. Track Hospitality Software powered ​ by Travel Net Solutions transforms your vacation rental company, so you can transform the way vacation rental advocacy plays out in your region. Track provides software solutions to decrease your technology footprint to save you time, money and resources. In fact, track was recognized by VRMB's Keystone awards as the software of the future and by aligning with a podcast like this one that goal is for track partners to then devote that newly freed up time, the profits and resources towards banding together against even bigger challenges, like unfair vacation rental regulations.

Matt Landau I think it's important for any short term rental community that's ​ looking to become more financially sustainable, considers both options. Because there's no right or wrong way of doing this. We've seen instances in which membership dues are working, we've seen instances in which one-time donations seem to be better than nothing. We've seen instances in which corporations are donating money for the organization to continue, I think it's worth weighing the pros and cons of where that money comes from. And if, in your case, Dana in that instance, in which the members themselves are actually even getting more out of it, that seems to me like a prime candidate.

Dana Lubner The idea of the membership dues, being multiple different voices, being ​ the driving factor that kind of parades, the narrative has an outcome that really services that community versus one big organization coming in, and funding the whole efforts, which leads to a much more singular focused outcome. So I love the idea. And I'm excited to get behind the idea of enlisting the participation of all the members of our community.

Matt Landau Even if it's a small amount, right, it can almost be a symbolic ​ amount of I don't even know Have you even thought about amounts just yet?

Dana Lubner No, that's something we will probably talk about offline. And I'll go back ​ and pick the brains of the other individuals, but I think it's even it's the idea. It's the ritual. It's the practice. It's the acknowledgement, it's the tip of the hat that I think really is kind of pledging a commitment by don't, you know, being part of that membership due process.

Matt Landau Pledging my support? ​

Dana Lubner Yes. ​

Matt Landau Love it. ​

Dana Lubner Our second big takeaway is recurring small payments, like membership ​ dues are different than big corporate dollars, membership dues help your group maintain independence, and foster sustainability.

Matt Landau So as we work our way through this, unpacking this money ​ problem solving for Dana, your group, we've kind of come full circle. And you've told me that you do want to make this change in which there is a way for members to financially contribute to the costs of running a sustainable organization. Have you decided when that's going to happen, like I'm guessing timing plays in here somehow?

Dana Lubner I will be totally honest, I haven't thought about when this will start. But ​ what I've have come to realize is that I wish I started this sooner. I think, you know, when you wait until a year and a half goes by, there's this expectation on of how things are operating. And I think it's a challenging thing for a new group. That's just getting off the ground to go, Hey, when you join our group, we're going to charge you something because there's such a feeling of inadequacy or, or greenness, or we're so young.

Matt Landau Or uncertainty, you don't even know what you offer. ​

Dana Lubner Exactly. But I think knowing that asking for those member dues or that ​ that monthly fee is going to help your group grow and solidify and become stronger, that much faster. Keeping that in mind is going to be empowering for you when it is time to say hey, we have a Do we have dues now? And this is what you get from those dues.

Matt Landau Have you thought about what would happen if you present the ​ dues and people say we refuse to pay them?

Dana Lubner I haven't thought of that, which is probably a good thing to consider in the ​ situation. Claire from garm and sand NC is used to people saying no to her fee structure, even if property managers want what her group offers.

Claire Reisweig (GARM) One company says we want to join GARM. We want ​ that protection and assistance, but our homeowner say, "heck, no, we're not going to pay those fees." That's what we pay you for. Then we have the situation where they said, "heck, no, we're not going to pay for GARM, I hear you say it's required, we're not going to pay for it. That's what my city taxes pay for."

Dana Lubner I have a feeling that's not going to be the case. Because any interaction ​ that I have with many members of our community, it's always showered with gratitude. We're like, thank you so much for what you do. And, and I appreciate that. And while it's nice to hear, I don't even think they know a majority of what it is that we do. So if they feel grateful for it, I think we can be pretty value driving, when we explain to people there is a monthly dues that will help you in the long run, have a sustainable business here in our city,

Matt Landau Dana, that's why I love you so much. I'm so excited to hear that ​ confidence, that courage, because that does require a real clear understanding of what you're bringing to the table, as a group of leaders as an organization, and confidence in the plan in the vision that the strategy that you're using, and a little bit of a jump, perhaps insane to the world, you know, we're gonna do this, and you're either with us or you're not. And I think people like you, and Megan, and Paige and the other people we've heard from this episode, you have earned the right to do that, like it didn't happen overnight, you are leaders who have already won over the hearts, really, of your local stakeholders, you've earned the ability to now clearly put a number of value on what it takes to operate sustainably. And guess what there may be some people who don't want to pay. And unfortunately, there's not no time for them.

Dana Lubner I think it's healthy in life and in business and in advocacy group, to ​ understand your boundaries. And to know when it's okay to say, hey, it's been fun, and you're on your way. And I totally think this year has been all about taking big jumps. And so I am excited to take this jump with my own advocacy group. And I'm feeling really optimistic about the outcomes.

Matt Landau This is all a deep kind of problem solving that we've just done. But ​ from a messaging standpoint, to your members. It's fairly straightforward. This organization has costs, the costs of this organization contribute to the benefits that we are bringing you, whether it's keeping your business open, or helping you get a new permit to generate side income. If you choose not to contribute to the costs that require required to get those benefits, that's fine, but you don't get those benefits. It's like the little red hen.

Dana Lubner Exactly. I mean, I think it just becomes super clear. And it's all about the ​ messaging and the way that you deliver this. So that it's a no brainer for people to say, of course, I will contribute to my future. And that it's something that you don't really have to shake your head at or consider it to not be an option. Our final takeaway is that the longer you wait to start collecting money, the harder it gets, as free creates the expectation of free.

Matt Landau I think it's a fantastic exercise for any organization, this one that ​ you've gone through of drafting out what your organization looks like, if it's done properly. In an ideal scenario, what are the main costs that go into this? Perhaps some of them can be covered by members? But what are what does this take to be done properly, especially if regulation becomes very difficult in our destination, and once you sketch out all those costs of running, something that can solve that, you begin to think about the money in a slightly different way. It's not like you're framed slightly differently. And you now are simply asking your members to participate in this broader strategy in this broader idea, which is really back to what you're good at, which is community leadership. So I congratulate you, my friend.

Dana Lubner Thank you. I was dreading the exercise at first, but after I had a big smile ​ on my face and I felt like Okay, so now just putting the paper on pen whether it's on a monitor in front of you or in real pen and paper fashion truly does help with processing. You know your hurdles and where you're maybe running into a roadblock.

Matt Landau And in the process, you taught me about kitties and the word ​ pugilist? Which I'm still don't know exactly what that is, but I absolutely love it.

Dana Lubner Hey, thanks as long as we can learn from each other, I think we can go a ​ long way.

Matt Landau Pugilism. ​

Dana Lubner Well, listener, the ball is in your court, it's time to get your host group on ​ firm financial footing and build up that advocacy war chest. Remember, you need to run your group like a business for it to last small dollars from lots of people help you stay independent. And the longer you wait to start collecting, the harder it becomes. If you'd like my advice on a specific topic, feel free to reach out to me at help at danalubner.com. And I'll be happy to connect with you. That's [email protected]. We want to give a shout out to Rent Responsibly for helping us get the word out and all of the incredible advocacy work they do. responsibly makes advocacy easy by helping local short term rental alliances get organized, and supporting local leaders every step of the way. And thank you to lexicon travel technologies for helping us get the word out with Vacation Rentals demand soaring if you're not on the otas and with the right channel manager, you're losing money, capture your share of this enthusiastic and growing market and get even more direct bookings with lexicon travel technologies, where you're always The Merchant of record and your brand gets top billing. I'm Dana Lubner. And thank you for listening. Stay tuned next week for Episode Six, where we talk all about communications. Please leave us a review or comment on your platform of choice. Make sure you subscribe today so you don't miss a single episode.

For more help with your business, join the Inner Circle membership ​ ​

Ep. 6: We Need to Talk

Phil Minardi (Expedia) Where local groups get into trouble is when you don't ​ have a clear mission statement and a clear directive that keeps everybody rowing in the same direction.

Jonah Mechanic (Seabreeze VR San Diego) You as the local need to be the ​ one to round the troops up to really show these OTA's that, hey, we got our proverbial stuff together, right? We're committed. We're a local organization made with local homeowners and restaurant owners that are already committed to this cause and have already started a group that are already collecting funds are meeting with council members downtown. We've already got this ball rolling, can you help us

Patricia Moore (Citizens for STR) As strongly as I feel about this, when people ​ actually get up and are willing to testify and say, I am supporting vacation rentals, I'm here to support them, you know, you have an advocate or a friend that standing next to you, and it takes very little to reach out together and pull those people together.

Bruce Hoban (VRONPS) When there's something really hot going on, you ​ know, in terms of, especially with COVID right now, you need to get your members on the zoom call every two weeks, or you will not come together fast enough, you will not raise the money you need.

Dana Lubner From my friends at VRMB communities. This is how to save your ​ vacation rental business, a 10 part educational series about the do's and don'ts of sustainable short term rentals. This episode is brought to you by Track, powered by Travel Net Solutions, providing integrated solutions to transform the way vacation rental hospitality works. This is Episode Six, We Need to Talk. In this episode, we'll learn how communication is directly correlated with your business's success. We'll learn how to create communication structures and explore best practices to make your groups infinitely more sustainable. And we'll learn how to use that sustainability to have difficult conversations that propel your group forward. Hello, everyone, and welcome to my show. Hi, Matt.

Matt Landau Hi, Dana. ​

Dana Lubner How's it going? ​

Matt Landau It's going great. It's beautiful. 82 degrees here in Miami. I saw that ​ you guys had one of your first snowfalls there in Colorado.

Dana Lubner Yep. Woke up on Sunday to about two to three inches of snow and it ​ continued to snow all day. But next week is supposed to get up to 70 again, so it's just that time of year where Colorado has a personality disorder of sorts.

Matt Landau And I think for a lot of vacation rental professionals in Colorado, ​ snow means immediate bookings, right? People come in for skiing and such.

Dana Lubner Yes, I think it like shifts your mentality to coming to terms with ski season ​ is around the corner. And the idea of not traveling internationally this year for a lot of people. I think they're thinking more about those drive to slopes destinations and getting out of their homes now more than ever,

Matt Landau Effortless Rentals Group vacation rentals in Denver for anybody ​ who wants Dana, we are into Episode Six. This is the second half of the season. We're in the homestretch. How are you feeling energy wise?

Dana Lubner My podcast energy bank is full and overflowing. I am feeling quite ​ ecstatic with how this has all turned out so far. The first few episodes that we recorded, had a very specific style of how to using sound bites being very practically driven in nature. And then the last episode was much more conversational between you and I, where you put me on the spot and in the hot seat. And I was able to work through something with my own advocacy group, live on the air so to speak. This episode will also be a little different in style, as we kind of touch more in depth between our own conversation about something that is so fundamental to the success of an advocacy group.

Matt Landau Yeah, I think that there's certain topics like money in our last ​ episode, and by the way, listeners if you haven't listened to that episode, Episode Five is really really amazing. Money is sometimes controversial, but it is a deep dive that we take. Dana, I'm also happy to hear that your podcast energy bank is overflowing because I feel like I'm in the middle of a rabbit hole of advocacy, it's dark, I'm starting to see a little bit of light towards the end of the tunnel. But we're talking about this second huge topic of communication. And this is kind of how you and I started chatting several months ago, about probably the industry's biggest weakness, and that is poor communication amongst stakeholders. You remember that conversation?

Dana Lubner I do, and just to jump back on something you said about your rabbit hole, ​ I would like to say welcome to the jungle. Because advocacy is a jungle, it can feel like you're bobbing and weaving and ducking and jumping hurdles. And sometimes you don't know if there's an end in sight. And that's part of the reality that we try to share with listeners is that it's beautiful, but there is a lot going on, and that the fight never gives up. So I hope you like the heat.

Matt Landau I do like the heat. I like it a lot. And I think this series is giving a ​ little bit of light to what was otherwise a dark jungle. But everybody's trying to get through the jungle to navigate their own way, they definitely don't have time to communicate with one another. And this is one of the biggest areas for improvement, I think across vacation rental destinations is simply communicating with your fellow vacation rental colleagues in any given destination. And Dana, you have done a fantastic job of that, but most destinations really struggle.

Patricia Moore (Citizens for STR) I don't have any problem reaching out to ​ people, I don't know, I am not afraid to meet people at any level, I don't know, the thing that takes time, is relationships, it's really getting to know each other. So the things that you find out when you sit down with those people is everybody has a certain skill set that you probably don't have. And the more diverse your group is, the more successful you'll be. And then you basically ask people, okay, so I reached out to you, can you do me a favor and reach out to eight people, and

then ask those eight people to reach out to eight more people, or you assign a small group within your group to actually reach out to a lot of people. And just in the state of Virginia alone, there are 10,000 hosts 10,000 there's plenty of people to reach out to.

Dana Lubner That was Patricia Moore of Citizens 4 STR at a core level doing this right ​ is really just about reaching out to other fellow hosts, building relationships, and getting information and ideas flowing.

Matt Landau I like to think that there's all these flows of information taking place ​ already, and if only we were to improve the communication amongst stakeholders in any given destination, the output of those existing flows would improve, it would accelerate.

Matt Landau The example that I gave you, the analogy that I gave you was the ​ data rate term that they use for in technology, when one device transfers information to another. It's called data rate. And the faster the data rate is, the more productive, the more power the sync has, of course, if you have a high data rate, you can download and upload and if you have a low data rate, you can't do any of those things, no matter how smart or motivated you are. And I think that most short term rental communities have very low data rates, the information is transferred really poorly amongst members. And when you began with Mile High Hosts, what was your instinct in terms of plugging up some of those holes?

Dana Lubner That was one of the first conversations our group had, we decided to nail ​ down what our best practices would be regarding expectations around communication. So we played around with the idea of just having a big group text. And that really quickly failed. For many, many reasons. We talked about using slack because a couple of us had used that within our own companies, and that never really picked up. And so we played around with a couple other tools out there. But I think there was a there's kind of this decision paralysis, so to speak, because there's so many different communication platforms out there.

Dana Lubner And the other part to keep in mind is a lot of times we're doing this like ​ for volunteer efforts, like we're in our 25th, our, we've been communicating with our, our companies, our employees, our colleagues, we've been communicating with our families and our personal relationships, and the idea of to put a concerted effort on having healthy communication practices that everyone can agree to, and partake in. It just takes a lot of extra effort. But I'd say it's so fundamentally important for the success of the leadership team, so they can avoid things like advocacy fatigue, or other types of frustrations.

Matt Landau Yeah, I think it's fair to say that if a group has good ​ communication, like any partnership, really, if there's good communication, you're able to sustain threats and shocks, and shifts, you're able to react quickly. If you have poor communication, all of those things sink you each time. And this this episode, today, we're not only going to go through why communicating with your fellow vacation rental professionals is important, but we're actually talking about how to do it. I'm looking forward to this.

Dana Lubner I am as well, this topic is near and dear to my heart, which I might say ​ that in every episode, but I'm a big believer of difficult conversations, radical candor, in communicating and getting it out there versus harboring it inside.

Matt Landau Dana, how does a listener decide who they should be ​ communicating with? I think that's the first step before even talking about the tools is who is this community that you should be communicating closely with.

Dana Lubner So there's lots of different avenues of communication when you have a ​ community based advocacy group that you're building, but in this episode, we're going to be talking about the internal partners that you'll be communicating with. Next episode, we'll be talking more about the external communications outside of the advocacy group. But the people we'll be talking about today is primarily those that are in your leadership group, as well as the people that are part of the outside alliance.

Matt Landau And I like to think that it's any vacation rental stakeholder in your ​ destination, who shares the same northstar, who wants to build a business that generates profit sustainably for a long time. I think that's a nice way to unite the community what people seem to rally behind. And in a lot of destinations, some kind of group exists already. And in some destinations, if somebody's listening to

this, they've never really communicated with their fellow vacation rental professionals in any destination. That's what we're talking about. We're literally talking about picking up the phone and giving that person down the street, a phone call,

Dana Lubner I think the more we consider all of the different players in the ​ conversation and having conversations with the stakeholders, not just the hosting community, it helps create that sense of Alliance and oneness, and alignment that's really important to set before you start making your whole game plan strategy.

Matt Landau So in episode three, Dana, Go Together, we talk about the ​ importance of finding local vacation rental professionals who share the same goals. And the big takeaway, if somebody didn't listen to that episode

Dana Lubner Is your good old friend Google, see if there's an existing advocacy group ​ that you can join. And if you don't find that there is one, reach out to other people that are in this space and start one yourself.

Matt Landau And I love your action items. At the end of each episode, literally ​ pick up the phone or go into Airbnb, or go on to VRBO and send that competitor a message and saying hey, I'm your neighbor down the street we've never met I would love to connect and work a little bit more closely with you.

Dana Lubner Phil Minardi has seen the best and the worst of host group ​ communication across the country.

Phil Minardi (Expedia) Folks like a NASTRA and folks like OSTRA out in Oahu ​ , the Oahu short term rental Alliance. They communicate regularly, on a weekly basis, I would say at this point with their membership, to ensure that the membership understands updates on progress towards that mission, but also updates membership on opportunities to get engaged, and to share their voice and to communicate their value, and to ensure that elected officials are hearing from them on a regular basis. So I think focused engagement that is sustained. And is not just one off, I think, is another attribute. That manifests itself in a

multitude of ways. But I think just continued engagement with membership, and whether it's through emails, or whether it's through group calls or meetings, I think is critically important to keep everybody rowing in the same direction.

Dana Lubner Our first big takeaway is that communication between community ​ members is directly correlated with the success of your group and the results it can obtain, communicate poorly, and nothing at all will be achieved. You want as much information as possible to be freely transferred between members as often as possible.

Matt Landau So for those who do have an existing group, together, should we ​ now shift into how to do it?

Dana Lubner In 2020, in a world that's super digital, there are so many different ways ​ in which we can connect and communicate. And I really look to you, Matt, as somebody that's sort of this, this godfather of community building, and bringing people together. And I know you've spent a lot of time not only over the last five months, but especially over the last five months, you know, spawn on by a worldwide pandemic, where everything kind of stops in its tracks. I'm hoping you can share with us some of your findings and your discoveries.

Matt Landau Yeah, after the pandemic hit, I did a little bit of soul searching a lot ​ of walking in the woods and thinking about the deepest problems that our industry faces and communication was really at the core of all of the, if you peel back the layers of each of these challenges, such as standards, such as safety, such as group marketing, if you peel back those layers and trace it back to the root, it's almost always a matter of, are the vacation rental professionals in any given destination communicating well, or are they not?

Matt Landau If the answer is yes, they're communicating well, almost anything ​ seems possible, like some of the examples that we featured in this series, but in most instances, the groups were not communicating well. So I began to dive a little bit deeper and began having phone calls with the best examples of vacation rental communities that we have in the United States, with the leaders, a lot of whom have been featured on the season of the show. And asking them, quite literally, what are your communication strategies. And all of them said that they

were using one or all of the following three communication mediums: the first, in person, pre COVID, and post COVID virtual meetups, the second newsletters, and third, some kind of forum, or virtual community. And I was thinking it might be neat to dive into each of these, Dana, and share what we've learned.

Dana Lubner Sounds like a plan. ​

Matt Landau So let's get started with in person and virtual. This is by far the ​ best kind of communication. In person, of course, used to be the norm, people would meet at the local coffee house or even in somebody's living room. And being face to face, there's just nothing that compares. Zoom, these days, post COVID is a set close second, in which we do have somebody's full attention, you are able to look them in the eye. But these in person or virtual meetings, were inherently limited to those who are able to attend the event. Not everybody is available all the time. And in some instances, people will recording or archiving the meetings taking place, but not everybody was able to physically be there. And Dana, I know that you guys have used in person and specifically virtual moving forward. Is zoom, your platform of choice? Is it the easiest way to get people into the same virtual room?

Dana Lubner Yes. Zoom has I think for at least, all the communications we've been ​ doing has the total market share, to bring us together, we could do phone calls, but it's important to be able to connect and see each other because there's just so much disconnection right now happening in the world. So I'm grateful for platforms like this as much as they are the bane of my existence.

Matt Landau Eventually you will get back to in person meetings as well. Would ​ you agree and pre COVID were those kind of your go to communication medium?

Dana Lubner Yes. I prefer the in person, I think there's nothing like sitting there ​ energetically sharing space together, but I will say there are efficiencies with just logging in from where you are, you're not saying, "Oh, it's a snow day. And we can't get together" or, you know, "the space we can't, you know, somehow it's locked in, we can't get in". So, there are efficiencies but I definitely look forward to the day in which we're meeting in person again. When COVID hit, I think everyone jumped to the ways in which they could, everyone's favorite word, pivot, and continue the connections that they were building off of and the momentum that they were gaining. I know that Debbie Herder in Portland had an awesome way to continue the strides that they had been making with their local community.

Debi Hertert (Host2Host) We had something planned that didn't actually come ​ to fruition. And that was host teas, we were going to start having a host tea once a month, and invite new members and potential members to just a little chat. So that we could get together in someone's home and talk about our businesses and maybe do some explaining, you know, a very soft sell for being a member and host a host. And then the first one was scheduled right after we got closed down. We then decided that we would have virtual coffees. So now we have, every Wednesday, we have a virtual coffee. And we have a different host that actually hosts that coffee that session. So we asked the host to come up with some small question to kind of get the conversation going. But it's open to all members. And it creates a communication and a networking that that we weren't able to do before. So the more people we get involved in something as simple as a coffee in a conversation, the more they're willing to actually do some work with us.

Dana Lubner I honestly, when Debbie first said that I don't know where my head was ​ at, but I thought she was saying like host tease like t e a s e. And it really made me stop in my tracks. And then I said, Dana, get your head out of the gutter. She's talking about a good old, wholesome cup of tea.

Matt Landau I thought it might be like a T shirt. And then I started thinking to ​ myself, it might be like a little like a little pastry. A hostee.

Matt Landau Okay, so Dana, let's move into the second medium that these ​ groups again, the best instances of short term rental community around the United States we're using, and that is email newsletters. And the beauty of email newsletters is that one person or a few people can sit down, compile important information that's taking place in your destination, and distribute it to as many people as you choose. A tool like MailChimp, I think gives you is free for up to 2000 members if I'm not mistaken, Dana, are you using some kind of newsletter platform?

Dana Lubner We are using the newsletter platform. But if I said that it was happening ​ in the last four months at the cadence in which we were prior I wouldn't be honest. But yes, we use MailChimp for the Mile High Hosts newsletter

Matt Landau And walk me through what a typical Mile High Hosts newsletter is ​ comprised of just so listeners can get an idea of the kinds of information we're distributing.

Dana Lubner One of the realities is that we realized there's so much ​ misinformation out there and there's so much of a lack of knowledge out there. So as we all do, whether we realize it or not, it's so easy to recycle something we hear. And just take it for fact. And so what we realized with these city council meetings we were having is that there was really no information. We would say, hey, so what are you hearing from your constituents about short term rentals, and they were like, honestly, nothing, I just read the headline of the latest article, and I see that we're taking this enforcement route pretty seriously. And so we realized that there was a huge opportunity to educate. And not only did we structure and write out our newsletters, so that they could be helpful to the hosting community. But we also sent out our newsletters, to city council, to city council's aides to the enforcement office, in Denver, as well as all of our media contacts.

Dana Lubner And so it was something we had to put a lot of effort into, how does this ​ come across? And what topics do we choose to cover. And we would start the newsletter out with something very macro, you know, industry news and updates that maybe weren't just related to our local destination. With another section that would go more on a micro update, we'd look to find like a positive host story where we could highlight something that a host was doing that was helping the community, or helping other humans in the world. And then we would have like a best practice section. So we would share tips about how you can have higher cleaning standards or ways to have conversations with your neighbors about the reality that you're doing a short term rental at your property. And then always ending with calls to action, action items, updates about events that people could attend, whether in person or virtual. And then of course, all of your social sharing. So share this on Facebook, and make sure you subscribe to this newsletter, share it with others.

Matt Landau So that was the overall structure. You mentioned something that I ​ think was natural to you, but it's worth pulling out and sharing with listeners, and that is segmenting the audience of a newsletter. Such a powerful communication technique. In fact, anybody who's looking to improve their vacation rental newsletter to guests should think about segmenting their list. Segmenting is really quite simply dividing your list up into groups of individuals. Dana's was government officials, neighbors, small business owners, vacation rental professionals, but your list could be anything. It could be people who drove to your destination from the local city, it could be people who came for a romantic stay, people who came for generational vacation, I could go on about using segmented lists as a huge marketing play. But one other thing Dana, I wanted to touch on is the frequency. How often were you sending these newsletters out?

Dana Lubner I have to be honest here. I was carrying the weight of this on myself. So ​ when I share and blow my own cover, it was the reality that I was doing too much and spread too thin. So at first, the intention was that they would be a monthly newsletter. And then I realized I was biting off more than I could chew. So I didn't set myself up for that from the get go saying, "Hi, welcome to the first edition of this monthly newsletter that I'm committing to for the rest of my existence." Exactly. And so I then decided to make them quarterly. So they're being sent out once a quarter, giving like some, you know, big powerful punches of takeaways, but if I had really refined my ability to delegate and hone in on the skill sets within my group or reaching outside of the group to bring others in, I would have loved to have seen these go out monthly, and they probably could have been shorter and it would have been less of a challenge to get them completed. So I think there is really a thoughtful effort into building out that cadence and you know, building a team that can help support you in doing this.

Matt Landau A perfect example of this in our interviews was Bruce Hoban in ​ Palm Springs who is not only sending out newsletters but he's giving us a return on that investment. Bruce was sending out newsletters and began actually generating new members, which contributed to his member dues.

Bruce Hoban (VRONPS) When we sent out mailers to 2000 homeowners they ​ had a website to go to, they knew what our mission was, you know, the purpose was, they knew who the board was. They could make a contribution right there. We started putting newsletters out. Newsletters pointed back to blog articles that

we could post on what was going on. And so pretty quickly, you know, by quickly, I mean, two to three months, it took a lot of people all of a sudden realize, Oh, heavens, look, this is a really, really organized organization. They're coherent, they're writing intelligent things are telling us what's going on. And so we pulled in, like 400 memberships within, I would say, three months.

Matt Landau So Dana, I think it's fair to say that newsletter is a really powerful ​ way to stay in touch with your local short term rental community, that it does require a lot of work. If you want to be consistent about it, if you want to do it, right. But it's worthwhile. In the best instances, it not only keeps people on the same page, but can actually generate new membership dues. The one downside of newsletters across my research was that they are one directional. You as the recipient of a newsletter, don't have the chance to read something, to iterate on that tip, perhaps improve it, and to immediately contribute it back into a live feedback loop.

Dana Lubner And now a word from our sponsor. Track hospitality software powered by ​ Travel Net Solutions transforms your vacation rental company, so you can transform the way vacation rental advocacy plays out in your region. Track provides software solutions to decrease your technology footprint to save you time, money, and resources. In fact, Track was recognized by VRMB's Keystone awards as the software of the future. And by aligning with a podcast like this one, the goal is for Track partners to then devote that newly freed up time, the profits and resources towards banding together against even bigger challenges, like unfair vacation rental regulations.

Matt Landau And this brings us to the third medium that we found could be ​ really great avenue for a short term rental community looking to improve its communication. And that is the live feedback loop. That is a virtual forum. A virtual forum could be Facebook, could be an independent platform, takes advantage of the fact that people have different schedules. And people have different styles of communicating and having one place under one virtual roof where people can log in when they choose. Ask questions, comment. This is a really valuable thing. However, most short term rental alliances weren't fully taking advantage of it. Dana, you started out using Facebook with your group? Is that correct?

Dana Lubner Yes, Facebook just seemed like the easiest thing to reach for that a lot of ​ groups have been utilizing. I think it was sort of the truth of there wasn't much better out there as an option. So let's just use something that a lot of people log into on a daily basis.

Matt Landau That was by far the most popular virtual forum that I found in my ​ research, because it's the most recognizable. But Facebook also has all of these downsides that I began to realize we're actually beginning to eat away at the purpose of the communication. And the more I dug into this more, I learned that Facebook groups, while probably the easiest place to host a virtual community, were also engineered in certain ways to keep attention, to promote topics or threads that elicit reactions, I call it inflammatory promotion. And it's not a place for true collaboration. It's a place to go. And of course, Facebook's goal is to keep you addicted to keep your attention there. So all the algorithms the feeds, even in some cases, the sponsored advertisements are really distractions, not designed to solve problems, but to keep your eyeballs attached to the screen.

Matt Landau In some instances, we even found that hotel lobby spies were ​ sneaking into these Facebook groups because they were so easy and because someone could stay relatively anonymous, and the Facebook groups in general definitely better than nothing, but presented some major issues in terms of creating healthy, collaborative environments, which is why I went down this separate rabbit hole of virtual community softwares. And there are tools out there that are designed for independent communities to be able to control and fully customize the way that your community communicates. Some that I found that I liked, one was called InVision. Another one is called Mighty Networks. Another one is called nation builder. In fact, nation builder is the tool that Bruce uses in Palm Springs.

Bruce Hoban (VRONPS) There's a platform called Nation Builder that is ​ actually used to run campaigns or political campaigns. And, you know, we evaluated a whole bunch of different things and looked at that one and said, Well, you know, this really is a campaign. Now whether or not it's something on a ballot or not, it's still a campaign. And so you need those types of tools to, to do things in one place, we have inbound mail, outbound mail, a website, every time somebody writes to us, automatically matches them to their member profile. And

we wanted everything in one place. And we do treat some things as a campaign some time. So we use the tools that are in there.

Bruce Hoban (VRONPS) The one thing it lacks, though, is a Facebook type ​ way where you can just chat, say, who's got a good handyman? Or does anybody know, you know, how I can get my air conditioning fixed on a Sunday. And so that's over in a Facebook space. You know, but that's primarily how we've, you know, set things up a lot of the organizations that have come to me from other cities and said, oh, we're using MailChimp over here. And we're using, you know, this for our web. And I'm like, can I just warn you all, that you are never going to be able to figure out what members have done, what who's writing what, who contributed what because you're in three or four different systems.

Bruce Hoban (VRONPS) So pick a system where you can do emailing, you can ​ keep track of donations. You know, you can put your website up, people can click through your emails into your website to find out what blog posts are more popular than other blog posts. Every time we do a mailing, you know, we put a little summary in the newsletter, and then you click through. And if you're a member, you know, we can see what's resonating with people and what people are not responding to. And so to me, that's the marketing campaign. And that's how we do this stuff virtually.

Dana Lubner So Matt, after the extensive research that you did on all of the options ​ out there, which one of the platforms Did you like most?

Matt Landau I'm so happy you asked that question, Dana. There, there was a ​ trend about the ones that I liked most Nation Builder is a fantastic one, by the way. And I commend Bruce. In fact, we used nation builder. For my foundation back in Panama, there was a certain downside to the ones that I like most, including Nation Builder. And that was that you're still paying a company on a monthly or annual basis, to host your entire community. And that if that company decided to change the way that it operates, if that company lost funding, a lot of companies post COVID experienced uncertainty, you are facing the exact same kind of dependence that we talked about with listing sites so often, and that your entire virtual community has the potential to just go poof. And that's a theme that

we are addressing on this show is choosing tools that allow us to be independent, and allow us to control our own destiny.

Matt Landau So to answer your question, we, me and my team, eventually ​ settled on using a software that was originally created for one of the first generations of virtual communities. And that was video gamers, which I thought was really interesting. This was one of the first breed of collaborators online who simply wanted to share with one another tips on how to, I don't know get past level 10. And the software that this group was using was open source, not unlike WordPress, you download it for free, and it's yours. You don't have to pay anybody anything ever again. You get to fully control the way that that virtual community operates. So I'm gonna take you back several years when we initially started developing this software specifically for vacation rentals. It's the software atop which we have built VRMB communities. And the beauty of this software is that we get to decide the rules, we get to decide what things look like, we get to decide who gets rewarded, we get to decide the points, systems that recognize good contributions, we get to decide all of that we're not dependent on any Facebook, we're not dependent on any external forces influencing the way that we collaborate. And then this is a convenient time to mention to our listeners that vrb communities is proudly working together with Denver's Mile High Hosts in an attempt to accelerate your existing flows.

Dana Lubner Yeah, it's really exciting. And I feel like it makes more sense now than it ​ ever has before, the Facebook group served a purpose. But I do think it really limited the ability for our group to grow and excel and become more professional. It was more of just like a sort of like an SMS, like texting platform, like ask a question instantly answer, but like, how does it actually take us a step further, as a community. And so there's some really cool things about the VR and the communities that I'm excited to see play out within our own group.

Matt Landau And one of the things that I am most excited about is that my job ​ now with this tool, which is one part platform, it's an actual tool, but also one part sort of training, training the leaders of your group on how to virtually build a community. This is very exciting to me, because you guys have done this work in real life. You are community leaders, by nature, you didn't have any training for that, you know how to galvanize groups, you know how to get the most out of

people how to motivate, folks. So my job suddenly shifts to focus on how to transfer all of those great characteristics into a virtual setting.

Matt Landau And the virtual community building practices are significantly ​ different than community building in real life. I think it's one thing to put up a platform where people are supposed to communicate, but it's quite another to build in best practices to build in engagement techniques, to know how to lay things out and to keep people coming in. And Dana, one of the things we've found with you is that it's also kind of habits that the leader needs to adopt when you're getting asked the same question over and over and over again, instead of answering that question individually, time and time again, a terribly inefficient way to share your wisdom. What do you do now?

Dana Lubner When I think about the efforts of community building advocacy, it takes ​ me back to my Bible days of the Tower of Babel, where everybody, everybody is working in a different direction, speaking their own language, there's just a huge cacophony of sounds and efforts where there's no united voice really helping spread those best practices. And I think it sucks the energy out of everybody's advocacy tank, and it can slow down the momentum. And so I think what the reality is that we have to really focus on is how can we leverage a time in which we're not getting together in person, we're not going to conferences. How can we leverage the time of a digital age in which we can easily share these tools are these success stories, or, you know, different things you can use in a setting with when speaking to city council and put them into one place where a Facebook group is not that solution? It's too singularly dimensional, without that whole idea of document sharing and resource pooling, with a sense of a true community that doesn't have that taint that sometimes Facebook brings to a lot of groups based off the way the algorithm works.

Matt Landau And it's worth saying that, if you, listener, are thinking about a ​ virtual community for your group, any of the ones that we mentioned are top I mean, that is a huge step in the right direction to improve the communication flows of your group. The coolest thing that the outcome of a thriving virtual community one that is comprised of feedback loops in real time that allows people to log in and not have complete noise, have some structure, have some guidelines, some rules, some moderators who are making sure that questions don't get asked multiple times.

Matt Landau The benefit the outcome to the short term rental community is that ​ no longer is all the responsibility on one person's shoulders no longer does it boil down to one person organizing an in person or virtual zoom call, no longer does it boil down to one committee contributing all their hours to put together a newsletter. If that individual or that committee were to disappear tomorrow, you'd be kind of out of luck. The beauty of the thriving virtual community is that the responsibility becomes distributed.

Matt Landau And when you said Dana earlier that you felt like you were spread ​ thin, that's the single biggest threat I think that the short term rental advocacy leaders face. People like you, and Debbie, and Bruce, y'all put in so much effort for the benefit of the group that you're eventually bound to burn out. So if there is not a system in place, and ideally, a piece of technology allows that system to work, you will not be there to lead the group any longer, because you'll have gone crazy by then. So I think it's worth investing while you still have that full tank of podcast overflow, focusing that energy on a system that allows your wisdom and your energy to scale so that when the time comes, maybe for you to pass on the baton, there's an existing flow of information that takes place under one virtual roof. And that can be a really beautiful and sustainable thing

Dana Lubner I think it's really worth highlighting, is you you'll have a leadership team, ​ once you build up a community based advocacy group in your destination. And we've talked about that over the season, you know the structure and laying the foundation and creating the best practices, and how important it is to set that up so that you can be the energy for the larger alliance, but I think if we really zoomed out a bit, and looked at each destination as a member of a greater leadership team, of a greater advocacy effort, we then provide fuel to each other in each of our destinations so that the collective effort of all of the leaders that are fighting for this fair and balanced approach to regulations can be so much more impactful and powerful. So the idea of really leaning on each other, and utilizing each other and asking those questions and sharing those resources and responding to the inquiries you'll get helps you back in turn, because you never know what you're going to need help with next.

Dana Lubner Our second big takeaway is that you must create communication ​ structures to help your group communicate, structures will not create themselves. And communication will not flow freely without them. Whether you're sending out newsletters meeting in person or on zoom, or using one of the many virtual community options, this town square for your group communication is critical.

Matt Landau That was a little bit of a glimpse into our plans with VRMB ​ community because the truth is you could have a thriving virtual community in one destination and a thriving virtual community in a separate destination. But if they're not under the same virtual roof, the cross collaboration doesn't take place. And that's the beauty of when numbers start to play into our favor. Let's move into the third section of today's conversation. What Dana does, communicating well, with your fellow owners and managers get you?

Dana Lubner The first thing that comes to mind is cohesion. I think feeling like you're ​ part of something brings you to the table in so much more of a fully present version of yourself, willing to dedicate yourself and your time and that 25th hour to the greater cause. I think it has to be something where you're feeling like a team player and a member of a community where your voice matters. So I'd say it's definitely the first thing that you want to get out there is as a as a we're all in this together and we're all sitting here as equals that can bring something to the conversation.

Matt Landau It gets you the chance to have difficult conversations. ​

Matt Landau I really believe that these difficult conversations that are taking ​ place amongst stakeholders, perhaps with opposition, perhaps with anti short term rental people in your destination, if the communication is taking place, you get to have those difficult conversations. And while it may not be enjoyable in the process, I think all of us agree that they're important to have, when it's all said and done. The opposite, of course, would be avoiding these conversations entirely, which creates distance, which then creates these vacuums that put us in serious danger.

Dana Lubner On last week's episode, you heard me tell Matt, I needed to have a ​ conversation with my own group about beginning to charge membership dues. That sort of conversation can only be had in a host group with well structured, free flowing communications.

Matt Landau And good communication also gets you the chance to sustain ​ blows. And Dana, I'm curious, you have done a great job of communicating internally, with your fellow Mile High Hosts, have you got an advantage or some sort of improved position, when you face some kind of challenge?

Dana Lubner If you don't have a communication channel laid out or a way in which the ​ group knows that they can expect and anticipate to hear from leadership or hear when there's something that they they need to be mindful of or aware of, or some change that's going to happen? externally, it's harder to get the larger community to jump into action. And I think, you know, we we haven't won all of our battles by any means. And we're going up against something later this year where I'm, I'm optimistic, but I think having the communication and the expectation that it's not going to always be a win, but what wins can we pull out of it needs to be part of the communication that happens within the organization. And the expectation that there's you don't just give up at that, you have to keep going and, and striving for something else, where you can find another win possibly down the road.

Matt Landau I think it's worth mentioning the outcomes of good communication. ​ for individual owners and managers in any given destination. Good communication with one another means better tips flowing freely, being replicated, mistakes, costly errors being avoided. That is a beautiful thing for any independent owner or manager that is almost always untapped. The second is for the leaders of the short term rental alliances. Great communication means that they're scrambling less, it means that they're less spread thin, it means that they can focus their efforts on the important stuff, and that their wisdom can be scaled as a group, good communication means you're more sustainable. It means that if your fearless leader was to go and move to Tahiti tomorrow to never return, you'd actually have some structures, some flows in place that would allow you to solve problems.

Matt Landau And lastly, Dana, you hinted at this good communication between ​ individual short term rental communities can also lead to cross pollination. It leads to an industry that is amplified, and to bring this conversation full circle, when I thought about the biggest challenges that our industry faces, all the things that we're really thinking hard about. Whether it's regulation, or standards or safety, all of it boils down to better communication amongst stakeholders. And perhaps that means holding an in person meeting, maybe it's holding your first

zoom call. Maybe it's restarting the virtual meetings, after several months of hiatus, maybe it's setting out to create your first newsletter, maybe it's pulling the trigger and investing in the virtual community. I think any of those are steps in the right direction, to better communication. And as I have come to believe, better communication leads to better output all around it could be the exact same people and ideas, but with better communication, the output is amplified.

Dana Lubner Our last big takeaway is that good communication grows roots, your ​ group becomes infinitely more sustainable. Good communication makes a group more resistant to threat and less dependent on any one person. Difficult conversations can be had in a group that communicates well, and these are the kinds of communications that propel your group forward.

Dana Lubner Alright, listener, the ball is in your court, it's time to take a good look at ​ your group's communications. Do you have the structures in place to promote the free flow of information? Are your conversations dependent on more than one or two people? Are you able to have a difficult conversation with your group? Remember, this is something we're all working on and can all always improve on? Go talk to your group today.

Dana Lubner If you'd like my advice on a specific topic, feel free to reach out to me at ​ [email protected]. And I'll be happy to connect with you. That's d a n a l u b n e r .com. We want to give a shout out to Ascent Processing: Ascent Processing is the destination for payment solutions in the vacation rental industry to help clients and partners be more successful.

Dana Lubner I'm Dana Lubner. And thank you for listening. Stay tuned for Episode ​ Seven, The Media. Please leave us a review or comment on your platform of choice. Make sure you subscribe today so you don't miss a single episode.

For more help with your business, join the Inner Circle membership ​ ​

Ep. 7: Telling Your Story

Dana Lubner I reached out via text to two city council members who immediately ​ called me back, I reached out to a contact at the state level to say what is the governor thinking is he going to be closing the beaches, and tour newspaper our local newspaper. That's another one that's great for leadership is is develop a relationship because your go to person for quotes and quick turnarounds when they need to know something. So I contacted them and said, What are you hearing all of those help put together a picture for me of what's happening and I think that when something like COVID hits these relationships, they help. They help you've got a window into what your your elected and appointed and staff. city staff are thinking about doing to help you plan for your own business. It's helped us a lot.

Alex Lawson Politics is pretty simple. Headlines drive politics. So if you can ​ make the news and tell your own story, you brought your own chair to the table.

Dana Lubner From my friends at VRMB Communities. This is How to Save Your ​ Vacation Rental Business, a 10 part educational series about the do's and don'ts of sustainable short term rentals. This episode is brought to you by Track powered by Travel Net Solutions, providing integrated solutions to transform the way vacation rental hospitality works.

Dana Lubner This is Episode Seven, telling your story. In this episode, we'll learn how ​ to craft and tell your story. We'll learn how to get that story to the media and how to get them to share it. And we'll learn how to use that story to reach government officials.

Dana Lubner Hello, everyone and welcome to my show. Today we're discussing one ​ of the most important topics of the season storytelling, which includes how to tell your story, why your story is so important to tell, and whom to share it with for maximum advocacy advantage. In the last episode, we discussed internal host group communications. This episode is about external communications, chiefly with the media and government institutions. The Good Neighbor Summit I helped put together in Denver is a big part of the reason why you're hearing from me today. And a big part of the good neighbor summit success was the media coverage we had at the event. I was in charge of the media coverage for the event, but I didn't have a whole lot of experience and public relations. After googling a bunch of things, I found myself cross side and with probably over 75 tabs open on my screen. Then the light bulb went off and I knew exactly who I had to reach out to. This person is one of the most badass people I know and has an extra special flair for strategic communications. The person I'm referencing is Alex Lawson, somebody who is a personal friend and attended my wedding three years ago, and is part of my music community, which is a massive part of my life. We're going to be hearing a lot from Alex this episode as I know of no one better to give a crash course in strategic communications.

Alex Lawson Well, first off, thanks so much for inviting me on. My name is Alex ​ Lawson. I'm the Executive Director of an organization called Social Security works. We fight to protect and expand Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and to lower prescription drug prices. But more broadly, we actually fight to empower people to raise their voices together in order to fight back against the power in the political system. That money oftentimes drowns out real people's voices. So I think that's sort of where I come into advocacy is seeing that the system is rigged right now against people who are working hard every day, following the rules, doing the best that they can, but still seemingly sliding backwards away from what I think we all see as the American dream. And the problem is that too much of the infrastructure, and the stories are controlled by the people with the money. And so when you control the story, you really are writing the future.

Alex Lawson So if you're convincing everybody that no matter what, you will ​ never see the change that you want. So just go ahead and give up. If people believe that they won't fight for the change that they want, they won't fight to ensure that the systems like social security that we all pay into are going to be there for us and actually work better for us. So I think that's sort of the route of advocacy, my own history, and it is sort of long of how I got there. But it is always based on this really clear piece of knowledge, that is the most fundamentally powerful piece. And I think I'd love to talk about it more in terms of your podcast, which is the power of story, and of controlling our own story, that when you can tell your own story. That is when you can become powerful.

Dana Lubner Something that's super cool about making friends through music is ​ oftentimes the last thing you know about these individuals is what they do for work. How do they make a living, which I find super refreshing. It's so far from a traditional networking event where you're exchanging business cards and saying, so what do you do? So Alex came into my life, like I mentioned, three music, we got to know each other on a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean, seeing live music, shout out to jam crews, and became fast friends even though he lived across the country in Washington, DC. My husband, Andy Lubner, would go out to DC quite often. And we continued to strengthen our bonds with him and his beautiful wife, Layla. And as we got to know, Alex, beyond the music note, we learned that he is a super badass in the political world. And not only has his own radio station, but he's an activist for preserving Social Security. And before I got into all this advocacy stuff, I really didn't fully understand what that even meant. And truth be told, I probably don't fully grasp it now. But I know that he is passionate about advocacy, and is incredibly smart and strategic, and understands the media game in ways that I could really use his intelligence.

Dana Lubner I reached out to Alex and told them I needed a half an hour of his time. ​ And he said, of course, and so we hopped on the phone. And I said, Listen, I got this situation, we desperately need to change the narrative, we need to make our own positive headlines. And we're putting on this event to help professionalize and unite the Denver hosting community. And I have to get the media to show up. What do I need to do? So in a matter of 30 minutes, and me writing as fast as I possibly could, he gave me a full rundown of all of the steps, best practices, what I shouldn't shouldn't do best case scenarios of the steps we needed to take. And if it wasn't for that 30, probably 40 minutes that Alex gave me on the phone. There's no way we would have had the media turnout that we had at the good neighbor summit.

Alex Lawson First thing to remember is that reporters are real people. So you ​ got to treat them as real people. Meaning don't be annoying. So you want to read their stuff so that you know what you're talking about. And I think the most important thing is to really know who is the right person to talk to so if reporter x covers dogs, and you keep pitching reporter acts a story on cats, reporter x is going to hate you. Especially if there's reporter y who does report on cats. So you have to know the landscape, do your research and figure out who are the reporters working the beat that you care about. And again, you're gonna find really quickly that it's not an enormous number. And depending on where you are, if you don't have much local news, there might not be somebody who works on your specific beat, there might just be like one reporter who covers sort of everything.

Alex Lawson Both of those cases, there's a strategy for engaging, what a full ​ story means is you should be able to say, what the headline of the article that you want to write is a little trick on that is that if you can put a question mark on it. We call it the Kabuto. Question mark. It's from Neil Cavuto on Fox, it'll give you sort of a good idea of how the store the rest of the story would flow. So it's like our short term rentals, the key to the financial future of San Antonio question mark. That is how a news story sort of set up the headline is not doesn't have a question mark, but it asked the question. So the headline in reporters is called the head HGTV, then there's a little under the headline. There's another one that I think most people call like a sub reporters call it the deck that is the like that answer to the question. And then the lead, which is led he just because reporters like having their own lingo, is the first sentence of the news article. And in reality, the entire story is told with the head, the deck and the lead.

Alex Lawson So if you can come up with three sentences, that tells the whole ​ story, there's more to it, you then and I can go through some of it you need real people to give the quotes that prove the assertions in the lead. But if you can just come up with here's the question that we're trying to answer. Here is how it's going to the question is are short term rentals, the key for the financial future of San Antonio, the deck I'm making all this up? Obviously, the deck would be something like an estimated x 10s of millions of dollars in revenue coming into the state through short term rentals, data, and then the lead would be this much inventory and San Antonio is being I'm trying to make it up on your area of expertise. So I'm failing. But that would be what I just did would be a bad pitch, right? Because I couldn't get it across to you. What I'm trying to tell what a good pitch would be is if you could actually accomplish what I tried to do, which is ask the question, answer it, and then make a strong assertion of like why this matters. That's the lead. And then the rest of an article is basically going back and forth. On those three sentences. What that means is you usually get like two people who agree with it and one person who doesn't agree with it. That's what objective journalism will always have. The opposing view.

Dana Lubner When Alex talks about telling your story and finding that hook that might ​ be of interest to a reporter, I think it's important to mention that we sometimes forget how unique our stories are. The national narrative on vacation rentals unfortunately tends to center around Airbnb. And it's oftentimes pretty negative. Small, hardworking businesses that give back to the community, create jobs and provide professional guest experiences, have a lot of stories to tell, that can help counter that national narrative.

Alex Lawson If you understand how journalism works, which you can Google, ​ it's a lot easier to understand what it is that a journalist would be looking for from you, and how you can be a source for a journalist so that they know that whenever this issue comes up, they're going to call you whether you make it into the story or not, you're going to be able to give them some information that's useful.

Dana Lubner In Denver. The fact that hosts were being charged with felonies gave us ​ even more of a reason to tell our own stories to government. The media and the community, I knew we could show we were good neighbors with the summit. But getting the media to pick up on it was a whole nother ballgame. When Alex talks about being a source, it sort of sounds like it's something out of a movie. But when you think about it, it makes sense.

Alex Lawson You want to have a relationship with a reporter so that you're not ​ always pitching, you're making it clear that you have information about this area, and that this story is going to continue. So they can come to you and ask you some questions about who's who, and and what's going on, especially at the local level, reporters are oftentimes super under resourced, they need to rely on on people on sources to give them the information they just can't follow all the goings on. And that's why it sort of bends towards powerful and a lot of money having a ton of influence.

Alex Lawson Very powerful, big institutions have more ability to do that, right, ​ they're going to be telling their story. And reporters are if they're only hearing from one side, that's going to be the story then go with once you have a story at the local level, that's the best. by far and away a story happening at the local level news being made on it. That's the best way to create a national story, if a national story is is important to you, oftentimes, the rules regulations, the laws, the things that people are focused on are not happening at the national level, they don't need Congress and the President involved is happening at the municipal or the state level. But each one sort of it's a concentric circle. So if you start at the local level, that and get a story there, you can feed that up to the state level. And then maybe this is a state capitol issue. And then if you get stories there, then you can feed it up into a national news story. That's the best way to ensure that a story is not just mentioned in and forgotten immediately, there's only a handful of stories that are told over and over and over and over again.

Alex Lawson It's called the news cycle. And once the story is kicked out of the ​ cycle, it's not gonna really get back in. There can be like a long news cycle for something. But there has to be a lot of meat on that story for it to hang around. And meat on a story is that local, that state reporting the fact that it has this history and has been reported out and up. That is how you actually can create a whole narrative. But really focusing at the local is the best way to impact a national conversation.

Dana Lubner Creating relationships with reporters has been key to keeping our story ​ alive. Because of the good neighbor summit, I was able to keep in touch with at least two reporters that put out positive coverage of the event. One of them even reached out to me months later to get a public comment on a short term rental related piece that was airing in the nightly news. I've kept in touch with these connections as you never know when you might have another story to share with them, or need coverage for a future topic.

Alex Lawson Usually reporters emails are right. Very easy to find it's weird if ​ they're not. If they're not, then you can kind of you know, you can usually find like the news desk email for and then ask them for the reporters email. But usually their email is right there and their Twitter bio because they watch tips and stories. And you can use a DM function direct message function on Twitter to get their email after you've created a relationship you know, just "Hey, great story," you know, ust a nice, thank you. You want to send them tips. So stuff that's happening. Hey, just wanted to make sure I thought you might be interested in this. Which, you know, you don't you don't actually want to put this but it's the parlance is in case you missed her. I see why am I at the beginning of an email, but no one actually does that it makes you look like a PR person.

Alex Lawson But it is like if something interesting happens. You want to send it ​ to them. Even if they probably know about it. You still want to send it to them. Because they might, it might kick off something like, Oh, I do want to write about that again, and they'll have a, you know, they'll be reminded that you are there to give a comment or a quote or something. So that's basically the key, though, is developing the relationship, once you get a story, like really have a spreadsheet with the contact information of that reporter, and just regularly updating them on

the story, not pitching them to do more work all the time, unless there's a really clear pitch to be made.

Alex Lawson But you just want to keep updating them so that you're staying in ​ contact. And another thing that this does is that reporters oftentimes have the best information about something that's happening, and they don't even, you know, like, they don't even have to try that much to get the best information, because everyone is pitching them. So if you're talking to them about a story, they might just be giving you not even on purpose, you know, much more information about that story that you're following, then you would be able to get on your own. Once you have a relationship with a reporter, you just have to know that the currency of the realm of reporting are scoops. And what a scoop is, is a story that no one else has, and a reporter just lives or breathes by breaking new news, the key of having those relationships is you're then looking for a time when you are going to have a scoop.

Alex Lawson And you're going to be able to drop this directly into the news ​ cycle. And then what that looks like, what's fun is like everyone's telling the same story, data, and then all of a sudden, boom, a new story, that the reporter that you have the relationship with drops. And now all the other news is going to try if it's a good enough story is going to try to catch up to that story. And they're going to write their derivative pieces of it. And then you can get instead of like one great story, you know, you get multiple ones, and you have multiple reporters digging into it from different angles.

Dana Lubner The media is always looking for stories to cover and a story that you tee ​ up and hand to them already written is even more appealing: make it easy for them. I'm a classic middle child, very much the peacemaker. I want both sides to win, to feel happy with the reality that travelers want to stay in short term rentals. And these travelers want to spend money in our local community. The power of storytelling is the ability to build bridges between people with different perspectives and shed light on something that desperately needs a listening ear.

Alex Lawson Just remember reporters are people producers are people -- ​ writing back just a thank you especially if the piece so like if the piece was a Grand Slam hit it out of the park, then you know you definitely effusive praise.

But there's a little bit of a harder one, which is really key for strategic communications. If the piece didn't come out the way that you wanted, which happens quite often in real life. We don't get what we want. You want to still send an email to the reporter and say, "Hey, thanks for covering the issue. You know, I wish that I'd gotten my point across more clearly to you would love to follow up further," it's really important to never remove yourself from you know, if the reporter has covered the issue area that is that you care about. You don't want to not be in their Rolodex. You want to be in communication with them. The key is all organizing is the follow up.

Dana Lubner I can't stress enough what Alex is saying about follow up here. And it's ​ not just about following up with the reporters that told your story. You can also use the stories to reengage with the community and government groups and fire up your host group.

Dana Lubner Our first big takeaway is you have to tell your story and get comfortable ​ sharing it. Think like a source, build relationships with producers and remember, it's all about the follow up.

Dana Lubner So I said to Alex, how do I write a press release and he said, You don't. ​ You don't need to write a press release. You need to write a media advisory. And there is a very specific way in which you do this, including these hashtags at the bottom of your advisory that indicates you're done.

Alex Lawson If you're doing an event, there's actually like a standard thing that ​ you want to do, which is a media advisory. And an advisory is about something that happens in the future. There's, this is one of the like, the show that you know, what you're talking about things and communications is there's a media advisory and there's a press release. And the media advisory is actually just who, what, when, where it's very basic of, and, again, you can Google to get like templates and stuff. But it's just here is the information about a thing that's happening in the future.

Alex Lawson Here's my contact info, the contact info the people, and you ​ basically are going to want to get in touch with a reporter about an event: press

conferences, demonstrations, anything that is potentially newsy, you can say, "Hey, can I send you an advisory?" you can also get press lists and just blast a large amount of reporters with an advisory, it has much less effect than actually going hand to hand identifying the specific journalists that you want there and going directly to them. And the best thing to do is both if you have the ability, a press release is is not nearly as useful, but you should google it and know what it is as well. It's generally quotes from people involved in the event that you're advising. And you send it out to the reporters who who covered it. And you're literally just giving them the quotes that they might put in their story.

Dana Lubner The media comes to the good neighbor summit and we're like, "wow, ​ Alex was right. Sure enough, it worked." We had at least five media outlets there and made the evening news, hosts that attended the event, were given airtime to speak their minds and express their concerns in ways that those voices were not making it into the media. One thing they say about the best way to remove bad press is the reality is you can't you have to bury it with positive stories. And so creating this good neighbor summit buzz generated a whole new wave of media coverage about the hosting community that had not been seen in, I don't know, ever. So I think that was a very much a pinnacle moment. For us. It was one of the first things that we highlighted as a goal of our leadership team in our advocacy group was to shift the narrative. And that's what led us to the good neighbor summit in the first place.

Dana Lubner Dana went and literally crushed it. And it shows what came out of that ​ with local news hits where the headline was, like literally exactly what Dana had written, you know, like, this is what I would want as the headline. And that's basically the headline. If it was really fun for me, because I think it was fun for Dana because all the things that I was saying when she was implementing them, it was working. And it's really powerful to see that happen to see like, oh, wow, they are they want to tell this story. If we do it in the right way, if we know how to actually engage this industry, which is the news industry. Like they want to tell an interesting story like this. And short term rental has a lot of drama to it. So it's a good one to pitch. So it was really impressive. Which is no surprise coming from Dana because she puts her all into everything. But I don't know Dana if you thought it was interesting to you that it actually like all that the mechanics, you know, you do it and then it's it actually works about you that was sort of interesting and fun as well.

Dana Lubner It was amazing. It was exactly as you described, and it was truly a ​ formula and it felt so empowering to know that, you know, I could follow this formula and achieve the outcomes that we were hoping to achieve with the good neighbor summit. You know, we wanted to make the news. And we did, and we could not have done it without the tips that you gave us, Alex. And now a word from our sponsor. Track Hospitality Software powered by Travel Net Solutions transforms your vacation rental company, so you can transform the way vacation rental advocacy plays out in your region. Track provides software solutions to decrease your technology footprint to save you time, money, and resources. In fact, Track was recognized by VRMB's Keystone awards as "the software of the future." And by aligning with a podcast like this one, the goal is for track partners to then devote that newly freed up time, profits and resources towards banding together against even bigger challenges, like unfair vacation rental regulations.

Alex Lawson The story wars will always continue. There's never a time when ​ like the narrative is just done. Because I'm speaking in your sort of focus area here, there's just too many interests that are all vying for the same space. So you have to constantly be involved there. But the first thing that you do, which I think the summit did so successfully, is flex, you have to walk in and flex and be like, I know what I'm doing. We have tremendous power here, because these are our people. And when our voices are raised together, they can't be ignored.

Alex Lawson Never wait for a seat to be given to you carry a chair around with ​ you. So that whenever the table off presents itself, you can be like, Oh, I got my own seat right here. That's the situation that you want to be in. When you're telling your own story, no one had to help you. Like, there was no gift for that you all did it all on your own. And it demonstrates that you can do it again. And that you know how to make news.

Dana Lubner Our second big takeaway is sharing your story with the media is a ​ powerful way to change the narrative. This allows for your story to be heard by different audiences, and from someone other than yourself putting it out there.

Alex Lawson If you get a lot of local stories, right, so you got Denver, San ​ Antonio, New Haven, Sacramento, I just picked trying to pick across the map, there's a thing, you know, sort of shorthand and communications, which is just

there's something happening here. If the same story is popping up in multiple localities, or multiple states, that's what makes it a national story. Right. That's what that's is what producers for the major cable news networks are looking for. You get into the news. But what you're really looking for is a segment on one of the opinion shows that are in primetime. The way to do that is to make sure that there is sort of the same story being told all over the place with people acting. It can be coordinated for sure. Like it can be, you know, activist network of owners who are all working together to affect the same change. That is definitely a story.

Dana Lubner When I shifted my perspective away from us versus them, I really started ​ to understand the power of Wifi. And the relationships I was building. I not only find more fulfillment and wire, I was putting my energy but I also became aware of my surroundings and the connections I was developing. And as I've been doing all season long, I will continue to be totally transparent and remind you that I don't have a background in public policy or government affairs. I do Have a background of being passionate about my community, and relentless my drive for improvement. But at first onset, much of this advocacy work was super intimidating. And while I'm being honest, at times, it still is. But don't be intimidated by government. They're here to serve us.

Dana Lubner As I shared in a couple earlier episodes, I was attending the short term ​ rental city meetings here in Denver, which we refer to as STRAC. This is for Short Term Rental Advisory Committee. And I was attending as a member of the public. After going to these meetings for some time, I came to the conclusion that I was unable to truly help the short term rental community by sitting on the sidelines. And I needed to jump into the game. Saunders and nationwide management company who signs master leases, but developer is in order to solve that all too complicated problem of inconsistency in our industry. Because of their footprint, they're often involved in government conversations. Greg Klein, a GM at Sonder has some great thoughts on communicating with government officials.

Gregg Klein (Sonder) It starts with a dialogue, understanding what policies they ​ are looking to, you know, bring in understanding the pain points, understanding how, you know, explaining how Vacation Rentals brings tourism and value. So trying to quantify that, trying to show all of the small businesses that we work with. So in Boston, we have almost 20 small businesses that we partner with, whether it's local painters and maintenance, women and men and or it's, you know, our cleaners or our laundry teams, all of these are small businesses, and

those people make up the community. So really trying to educate even city council members on what is the product, how do we avoid, again, those nightmare scenarios that everyone sort of heard about when Airbnb first launched, or when you know that one new operator came on that didn't really understand how to keep things legitimate.

Gregg Klein (Sonder) You know, sometimes, you just go on the government ​ website, and you can just start to email a city council member or a local Association member, it's pretty once you kind of like break in through into the circle, then it's very easy to know where to go next. It's just, it probably starts with a city council member. But we also partner with local, if needed, we will partner with local, like, professionals who, you know, we have a zoning attorney, for instance, in Boston, because everything that we go through, we want to make sure we're operating in a legal and compliant way. So you know, that zoning attorney might know who to contact, that that'll be kind of your in and once you're on the inside of that circle, then you just kind of one conversation leads to three, and so forth.

Dana Lubner City Council and other government officials are dealing with a bunch of ​ different concerns and topics and agenda pieces that are on their desk. They're not here just to learn about short term rentals. And so in order for you to be able to really make a breakthrough with them, you have to be able to tell your story. And yes, you can go meet with them and sit down with them and ask them for a one on one and share with them your story. But the truth is, there's power in a headline, there's power in a publication, there's power in somebody else, promoting and circulating your story. So minority of Expedia group works tirelessly behind the scenes with state and local governments all over the country to advance the case for professional vacation rentals.

Phil Minardi (Expedia) So New Orleans is a great example. Because in New ​ Orleans, what we did is we recognize that New Orleans is a city of neighborhoods. And you have to be willing to listen to the community and be open to the community's input, if you want to see any progress. So what Expedia group verbo and ANP did is we held open community meetings across the city, in every neighborhood in the city of New Orleans, and we invited the general public we quite literally printed out flyers and drop them on every doorstep in the city. And we held these meetings at gymnasiums, we held them at community centers, and we just invited the community to Hear our perspective, to hear the

perspective of a local property manager, that's, that's from their community, and to get their feedback and to give, give them our perspective.

Phil Minardi (Expedia) And I think that open transparent discussion is a ​ cornerstone to our ability to make progress in our cities and in our issue set. So we have to be open to listening to the opposition, we have to be open to understanding that their concerns are as valid as ours are somebody who's concerned about their neighborhood is something that is worth us taking very seriously. So I would say that the first is we need to turn these folks from opposition to partners. And we do that by listening. And we have to be okay with saying I don't know, and be willing to work together to get the answers. I would say in markets where we've done that, in markets, where we've been willing to listen to community members been willing to engage with our opposition in an open way, I think we get an outcome that is inherently more favorable to our partners in the long run. And then if we just close ourselves to openness, close ourselves to dialogue, because the alternative is, in a lot of cases, a ban, or a continuation of uncertainty. We we destroy our enemies by turning them into friends, which is an Abraham Lincoln quote, I think, and I know that's aspirational. But I think there are quite a few examples of where we've been able to do that in a responsible way. And in a way that preserves our industry long term.

Dana Lubner Putting on the good neighbors summit, and getting the event into the ​ media definitely helped me later when talking to government officials. The coverage gave me a reference point and positive representation of the hosting community that helped counter the negative that they had been hearing about over the last year. Bad hosts and party houses were very much not an accurate representation of the larger community.

Alex Lawson If you are part of an organized assembly of people, you're much ​ more powerful than just by yourself. So the first thing that people should do is, is just realize that they're not alone, and try to find their allies and comrades and neighbors who likewise believe what they do, because it's easy to ignore one person's voice. But you know, when 1000s of us are standing together, it's impossible to ignore our voices together.

Dana Lubner Our final takeaway is that once you've got your story, share it with ​ government officials, especially if you've gotten media attention on your side now. They have to listen. Your community oriented small business job creating vacation rental story has a lot of power to counter negative national Airbnb press in the minds of local officials. It's the only thing that really can. Alright, listener, the ball is in your court. What's your story? How will you tell it, it's time to get out there and share it with the world.

Dana Lubner If you'd like my advice on a specific topic, feel free to reach out to me at ​ [email protected]. And I'll be happy to connect with you. We want to give a shout out to proper insurance. Property Insurance is the nation's leading short term rental insurance provider. Their custom policy not only offers unmatched protection for your vacation, home furnishings, business, income and host liability, but also includes enhancements for unique short term rental risks such as bedbugs, and liability for guests amenities like bikes, kayaks and hot tubs. To learn more or to request a free insurance consultation, visit proper dot insure. I'm Dana Lubner. And thank you for listening. Stay tuned for next week's episode. When it all goes wrong. Please leave us a review or comment on your platform of choice. Make sure you subscribe today so you don't miss this. Single episodes

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Ep. 8: When It All Goes Wrong

Phil Minardi (Expedia) In every market where we've faced anti vacation rental ​ policy language, a driving force behind that narrative, and behind the anti VR sentiment has been largely driven by hotel interests. Yes, there is a contingent of community members that are concerned about Vacation Rentals in the character, their community. And those voices are important and need to be heated and need to be engaged. But to a large extent, over the course of the last decade, the largest anti vacation rental voices in a local state or even federal context, have been the hotel lobby.

David Krauss (Rent Responsibly) So I would say that unexpected difficulty ​ was actually an expected difficulty. There's only two types of work. There's easy work and hard work. And it doesn't mean the work is different. It's whether you want to do it or not.

Eric Bay (ANP) Things got out of hand and city council members ran on ​ platforms that said, we want to rein this in and stop this. And unfortunately, what they did was take several draconian measures and take backward steps in eliminating about 70% of all of the formerly licensed and legal properties in New Orleans.

Dana Lubner From my friends at VRMB Communities, this is How to Save Your ​ Vacation Rental Business, a 10 part educational series about the do's and don'ts of sustainable short term rentals. This episode is brought to you by Track powered by Travel Net Solutions, providing integrated solutions to transform the way vacation rental hospitality works. This is episode 8, When It All Goes Wrong. In this episode, we'll learn some harsh realities about the vacation rental business. Even if you're doing everything right. Things can still go wrong. We'll learn how to stay motivated no matter what and how finding a lasting compromise can keep your business running well into the future.

Dana Lubner Hello, and welcome to my show. I've got the man everyone writes to ​ when things go wrong right here with me in virtual podcast land.

Matt Landau Dana Lubner. How are you doing? ​

Dana Lubner Matt Landau, I am doing fantastic. How are you? ​

Matt Landau Recently somebody asked me if you and I intentionally include our ​ entire names in our introductions for branding purposes. And I said that's so far beyond what I'm capable of thinking about. It's just the weird way that we talk.

Dana Lubner Exactly. I wish we were that intentional. But I think it's probably a ​ compliment to ourselves that we are marketing minded whether putting in the effort or not.

Matt Landau And Dana Lubner, I would like to officially congratulate you on ​ hosting your second annual Good Neighbor Summit two weeks ago for those who have been following along in this wonderful journey. Describe the event that took place.

Dana Lubner Absolutely. So as we talked about earlier in the season, putting on a ​ major event is part of controlling your story and controlling your narrative. So we decided to do the second annual Good Neighbor summit this year and made it a virtual event. And it was a great success. It was totally different from everything from timelines and plantings. And you know, a lot of the details that you have to iron out when you throw an in person event, but it had a great turnout and we had some really impressive well received keynote speakers. And one of them was you.

Matt Landau It was me and it was such a pleasure to take part in that event. ​ Some of the things I was most impressed by where your organizational skills along with your team, the planning for an event of only two hours or so was above and beyond. Your selection of speakers, we also had someone from Expedia, we had someone from visit Denver, and you shared super valuable information about your new license that we're going to be discussing today. You also had an incredible amount of people who actually paid to attend this virtual event. And I think that's a really important step in the direction of working together. Is everybody chipping in together? So I just wanted to congratulate you again, I think people listening to this, if they have been thinking about their own event, a virtual event is pretty accessible to everybody these days, wouldn't you agree?

Dana Lubner Absolutely. It's, it's more accessible than ever. And, you know, just to ​ touch upon the fact that we charged for the event, I was really hesitant to do that knowing how much material is being put out there. And now and how many webinars people are offering at free of charge. And so it really was quite amazing. Every time a notification came in that somebody had purchased a ticket, and it allowed for us to, you know, build up our own reserves for the Mile High hosts. So it was really amazing.

Matt Landau Really amazing. And to kind of catch everybody up to speed at this ​ point, we're on episode eight, Dana, the finish line is in sight. I don't know what we're gonna do with our days when this season is complete. But today, we're talking about what happens when everything goes wrong. And give our listeners a bit of a recap in terms of what we've discussed to get us up to this point.

Dana Lubner Yeah, so over the season, we've covered a lot of how tos, which you ​ know, are my favorite, everything from how to hook you know, form a host group and how to finance it, how to throw a big event, how to organize your internal and external communications, and the true importance of sharing your story with the world.

Matt Landau With our boy, Alex Lawson last episode was fantastic. ​

Dana Lubner I was a big fan of that episode personally. ​

Matt Landau And if people are listening along and have more or less been ​ following these steps for their destination, they will find themselves in among the best company, I would say in terms of running a professional and sustainable host group. throughout the world, really, you have positioned yourself to fend off threats as well as possible. But Dana, I'm guessing that once we do all these things, that's the end of the story. It all goes perfectly and lives happily ever after. Is that correct?

Dana Lubner Yeah, you pretty much get a run off into the sunset into a rainbow over ​ the ocean and never have to look back again.

Matt Landau And of course, listeners, that is our really subtle sarcasm coming ​ out. Of course, that is not the case. Today, we have some bad news for you, Dana, you want to reveal it?

Dana Lubner Yeah, the truth is that things don't always go the way that you plan. And, ​ you know, when you fight the advocacy fight, you have to put a lot of passion and energy into envisioning or striving towards certain outcomes. And the truth of the matter is that sometimes those outcomes do not turn out the way you had planned. And it can feel like a complete burst of your bubble when that happens. And so today, we're going to talk with the listeners about how to keep that in the back of your mind and how to keep the energy going beyond the finish line of a specific accomplishment you're trying to achieve. And to plan for, like we've always said, never giving up on this path of advocacy, because there is really no finish line. When you're doing this advocacy marathon.

Matt Landau And Dana, you've given the soft version that things can go wrong. ​ I'm a bit of the more aggressive side of the spectrum, I argue that things will go wrong. And when we look at the way things have gone wrong, and all of our interviews, it's almost always, when a group thinks that they have won things that they're ready to sail off into that sun, a rainbow over the ocean when they've let their guards down a little bit. But it's not always the case. We want to be very clear that even if you're doing everything right, and you're putting all the effort in over time, things can still go wrong then to it's not. It's not a very reassuring idea.

Dana Lubner No it's not but I think it's a healthy dose of reality. And it helps you kind of ​ set the stage for yourself. Like I was saying that it's not just going to be this smooth sailing, when you've built up your team and you've created your newsworthy event and you've have member dues coming in, you're still going to run into things that go wrong. So it's important for our listeners to keep that in mind when they decide to raise their hand and get involved in this community work.

Matt Landau And I think it's fair to say that we tend to hear from people who are ​ freaking out because it has gone wrong. Because some threat is very imminent. Because if there's not a threat that's imminent, things aren't going wrong. Most people are content just kind of going about their business. If you are listening to this, at which at the point in which something is gone terribly wrong and your destination, I think it's important one to reference back to the first seven episodes of this series, which act as a sequence really, in terms of what to do to give yourself the most protection. But also to remind folks that like in the case of Dana's Good Neighbor summit, Dana, you were supposed to have this thing in

real life in a vert in an actual room, but you ended up pivoting and allowing the initiative to continue.

Dana Lubner Exactly. I mean, I think that's the favorite word, one of the favorite words ​ of this year. And I think that can be surprising to find outcomes when you have that flexibility, in your, you know, the way that you're strategizing to accomplish certain goals and to show the hosting community, what the future has to hold for them. So it is about being able to say, okay, we can't do this in person, but what can we do instead? And how can we still drive value,

Matt Landau I always like to think that when things go wrong, one of three ​ outcomes happens. One, you realize that you're capable of things you never imagined prior to people come out of the woodwork to help. And three, you get an entirely new perspective on your business and your destination.

Dana Lubner Think about 2020 I think it's kind of perfectly aligned with the theme for ​ this episode, when things go wrong. And you know, you can't control the things that are outside of your reach. But what you can do is control your reaction to them. And to just be aware that there are beautiful outcomes that have come out of this year for many of us listening that we never anticipated, we probably would have never had the opportunity to realize if things had not gone wrong. So while you see something on the onset as wrong, you may a couple months later a year later, go, "Damn, I'm really happy that happened."

Matt Landau And I think that's about perspective and having the right attitude. ​ And we're going to talk about motivation a little bit later, but making sure that you're seeing all sides, not just the dark and doom and gloom, but the opportunities in adversity is often the best step to overcoming it.

Dana Lubner Speaking of perspective, Dave Krauss from Rent Responsibly has seen ​ just how tough things are out there. Dave reminds us that many industries face adversity in their early years, and coming together as an industry and thinking about the problem in a way that is beneficial for the community, and the user. And the industry is usually the way forward to solve these problems.

David Krauss (Rent Responsibly) The automobile proliferation between 1909 ​ and 1916 went from 200,000 automobiles to 2 million automobiles when the rules of the road were antiquated and built for horses and buggies. It turned into a safety and community mayhem problem, there were calls to guess what ban the automobile until people realize, Hey, this is a better way to get around, you can go three times faster, your horses don't get tired, it's more comfortable. And with innovation, it becomes cheaper and cheaper over time and more and more people can experience something that they want to experience. consumer demand will always remain undefeated, we have to harness the good. And the incremental contributions that the otas and other private businesses can contribute. And it's not always money. It's it's you know, can you send this email, can you get other? Do you have a list of people in San Diego get them involved. In the 1920s the chance of dying of while driving one mile in an automobile was 10 times greater than it is in 70 years later in the 1990s. I've seen the graph. It's unbelievable. And the reason that this worked is because the private industry the Fords of The world realize that unless they step out of profit seeking, you know, business DNA mode and support things like the American Automobile Association, we all know what is triple A, and start studying this and helping government figure out the rules of the road, they just never we're going to get to their destination.

Matt Landau And when things go wrong, what does that exactly mean? Like ​ what kind of things? What does that look like things going wrong, Dana?

Dana Lubner It can have a variety of different shapes and forms. It can be something ​ like your government regulations are being revisited and changes that will impact your business are coming down the pipeline, it could be something like what many of us are dealing with right now like a worldwide pandemic that takes place and you know, with no real end in sight, but it could be something as close to things not going well with your leadership team, or your host group or a sense of advocacy, that fatigue that is really hard to motivate people. So there's all different ways that things can go wrong. But specifically, in this episode, we're going to focus when things go wrong from a government regulatory standpoint.

Matt Landau And as if that's not daunting enough, I'll add on an additional layer ​ of complications. You may be listening to this, and things may be going wrong in

your destination. And you haven't done any of the things that we've been talking about in the first seven episodes of this series, in which case, Dana, any advice?

Dana Lubner Go back and listen to each one of them. ​

Matt Landau You also may be listening to this, and you and your vacation rental ​ community have been putting in all the legwork over time that we've been talking about, and you've achieved something great, you've had a great victory, and you potentially let your guard down. And that's when the thing goes wrong.

Dana Lubner This is a big one here, I just want to jump in Matt, if I can, because it's so ​ important. Just as I've said before, there is no finish line to advocacy work. And when you have a victory, do a high five, but then, you know, it's back to the drawing board and making sure that you have your next step and your neck next action plan set up. Because if that victory could, at some point, change down the road.

Matt Landau And maybe just to make everybody feel comfortable, or the ​ opposite of comfortable. You may also have the third and final path in which you've been doing everything you've achieved great things you have not let your guard down. And yet still, something goes wrong. This happens. And I think my big takeaway from today is that it's never quite as bad as it seems. And there's almost always a path forward.

Dana Lubner Our first big takeaway is things can and frankly, will go wrong. As we've ​ learned this season, if you're not organizing your host group, funding it and telling your story to the outside world, you are especially vulnerable to unfair regulations. But this can happen even if you're doing everything right. You cannot let your guard down after a perceived victory. And you have to be ready for things to go sideways, even if your guard is up.

Dana Lubner I think about things going wrong here in Denver. You know, as I've ​ shared in previous episodes, there are mug shots of hosts and hosts going to jail here in our own community. And things went more than wrong, things were completely upside down. And so that's really what was our wake up call here for our community that we needed to get involved. And so, you know, we were starting to change that narrative and change the perspective through events like the good neighbor summit last year and building relationships with our local officials and other individuals within the community. But it hasn't been rainbows and unicorns for us here since then.

Dana Lubner And that's why each little victory that we accomplish, whether it's ​ preventing a cap on the number of days that somebody can rent their property doesn't mean okay, you know, let's put down the roadmap forwards of planning on what's the next thing we need to accomplish our nurture, or Foster. It just means that we have to strive towards the next area in which we know that there is a negative perspective or a need for nurturing So we've things haven't stopped here in Denver for us. You know, it's not just because we've had a couple of victories, that everything is great within our own community. And that's why we continue to pursue new endeavors.

Matt Landau How important is like morale throughout this process? Because I ​ feel like if you let one of these things like hosts going to jail, get to you, or deplete your energy, it can be deadly. How do you combat that?

Dana Lubner I think the hosts going to jail caused everybody to say, "Oh, my God, ​ we've got a problem. And I need to get involved." And so, you know, sometimes those things going wrong scenarios really help people jump into action. But you know, for example, earlier this year, the city wanted to change some of the language that set the parameters around what a primary residence meant. And we fought that and met with City Council one on one and tried to explain that to them, how to see between the lines of what was being presented as something that was beneficial to the community, and how we were perceiving it, and COVID hit and that that legislation was passed through. And there was amendments that we couldn't stop. And, you know, it's important to share the bad news with the hosting community that, hey, we weren't able to stop this, which people were pretty upset about, because they were already super guarded about how short term rentals are being enforced in our community. And it's important to say, hey, this isn't a total loss, things haven't gone wrong. We've just built out relationships with 11 different city council members, they now know who they are. And they've asked for us to come to them if things do go wrong with this new amendment to our ordinance, and welcome to the conversation. So it is about finding that silver lining, even if you don't find a win or a victory in what you're working on.

Matt Landau I'd even go as far as to say, it seems like if you can use the thing ​ going wrong, to galvanize your group to make it even stronger. Whether it's uniting people behind a certain value, or getting people to show up at a particular meeting, if you can use that adversity to propel your group forward. Together. It seems like the best kind of advice I've just observed, the more and more I speak with vacation rental professionals and advocacy communities throughout the United States. staying positive, and staying motivated is really important needs to be like the heavy energy of your group as we are moving forward. And that tends to overcompensate when something does go wrong or when an outcome is not desired. But it's also funny that I kind of realized this is how I found myself into the advocacy world, that motivation and finding the best of what we're all capable of and showcasing the best stories that basically is this very advocacy work. It's the storytelling, it's the championing of our niche when it's done properly. And have you found that this kind of adversity has something of a domino effect.

Dana Lubner Sometimes the adversity can ripple right into your own leadership team ​ or the Alliance where you know, a victory that everybody is putting their energy towards, isn't realized. And so I think it's so important as the leaders of the group, to make sure you don't let everything go that you've been working on and kind of have that plan B as part of your response. So you throw an event, you should have your emails queued up after your event to send out immediately, like you've just put your energy into putting on this big show, the last thing you want to do is write a recap of the show, and all of your thank you so you prepare in advance. And I'm not saying prepare in advance for loss, or prepare in advance whether it's mentally, emotionally, that if this doesn't turn out the way that we're hoping that there's still this path forward of inspiration and motivation, and how can we shift our perspectives or shift our approach or not take no and see if we can maybe find some sort of concession or compromise. So it is really really important as the leaders of these community groups to plan for that adversity. Film and already have experience A group has seen this cycle play out across the country.

Phil Minardi (Expedia) "Success is not final, failure is not fatal. It is the courage ​ to continue that counts." And I think when I look back on both the winds that our industry has had over the course of the last few years, as well as the defeats in every instance, my message to a local leader, or property manager, is this is not the end of the conversation, the conversation is going to continue. And we need to be there, we need to be ready for the ability to advance our interests moving forward. So Eric Bay, and I have been in the trenches together for years now. We've taken steps forward, we've fought some incredible fights, and we've seen negative policies past Council, but the message I gave to Eric and the message I

know Eric gave to his membership and that he feels in his bones is that there is always another day to fight to challenge negative policies or to promote positive change. The reality is, you just don't always win. But you always have to be ready for a chance to build those relationships further. And to be ready for the opportunity to advance the conversation in a direction that is going to benefit our industry.

Eric Bay (ANP) It was fairly hard to pitch the idea of membership, when some of ​ the members said, "Well, we failed, we don't have licenses anymore." We're not licensed, we're not legal, why do we want to even continue, which was a whole nother challenge trying to explain to them, we said, "if you're not at the table, they're going to eat you for lunch." Well, now we're at the table, and maybe some feel they have eaten us for lunch. But there's still a few more courses left in the meal. And we need to stay active as a vocal player. One thing that you find in industry leaders and industry participants worldwide, and that's passion, because they believe in what they're doing. They believe in, in their personal hosting story, their home, the creating of memories and experiences, they believe in a business model of generating revenue, their strongest supporter and cheerleader is themselves. It's just a matter of getting them to not be discouraged and saying, "hey, collectively, we can do this." If it's just you one person, you're not either going to have the intuition or the inclination or the desire to go forward. But everybody in this room has that same goal and that same mindset so collectively, we could do this.

Matt Landau A way I think listeners can associate with this, as it is foreign to a ​ lot of folks is a work environment in which something went wrong. And yet you had a colleague or a boss or a leader that was reminding everybody of the master plan, and reminding everybody that there is a process and that it is going to turn out okay. Not to freak not to collapse. to revert back to what we've been practicing the stuff that works. There's a certain relief, I think in that kind of leadership or at least perspective when something goes wrong. And keeping your head high is one way of phrasing it. But I think it's also kind of keeping your head down and focused on the things that are in your control.

Dana Lubner So Matt, you speak with a lot of hosts and owners and managers around ​ the world. And I would imagine you hear all varieties of stories from them. Is things going wrong, something you often have them share with you.

Matt Landau Oh my gosh, yes. There's two sides of it. One are the emails that ​ come in. And those are typically emails like help me We're sinking things are going wrong right now. And for that I've been sharing with people our podcast series been sharing with people the Avengers advocacy playbook, which we can add in the show notes below. The other side of it are the destinations that I've visited. In filming sense of place and the vacation rental show where we've had amazing experiences we've met just these remarkable vacation rental professionals whether they own and manage one property or or 50, or 100, we've had just really transformative travel experiences. And yet, in almost all those main destinations, there's some looming threat of regulation. There's some very daunting, like imminent threat that things will go wrong.

Matt Landau And you can just tell that it weighs on the professionals of that ​ destination, because you could be doing a fantastic job at the hospitality side. But all of a sudden, the rug literally gets pulled out from underneath you. And your efforts are not it's a it's a, it's a hard thing to sleep with. In fact, when I ran my vacation rental business in Panama, those were in the early days when they were still deciding what a short term rental was, because they literally didn't have it in any kind of legislature. And for us, it was stressful, going to sleep each night, knowing that they may come knocking on the door tomorrow and say, You're shut down, or they may impose a ridiculous fine, and that we wouldn't be able to pay like these. These things definitely keep you up at night. But I think it's also important, we're going to talk about this a little bit later, that these things do happen, and they almost always end up resolving themselves a little bit, it's never quite as bad as you first think it is.

Dana Lubner Our second big takeaway is keep your head high. Even when things ​ seem really messed up. There's a path forward. When things go wrong, gather your host group around you use each other for motivation, find perspective on the opportunities and adversity and get ready to go to work and save your vacation rental business.

Dana Lubner And now a word from our sponsor. Track Hospitality Software powered ​ by Travel Net Solutions transforms your vacation rental company, so you can transform the way vacation rental advocacy plays out in your region. Track provides software solutions to decrease your technology footprint to save you time, money and resources.

In fact, track was recognized by VRMB's Keystone awards as the software of the future. And by aligning with a podcast like this one, the goal is for track partners to then devote that newly freed up time, profits and resources towards banding together against even bigger challenges, like unfair vacation rental regulations.

Phil Minardi (Expedia) I remember about five years ago sitting down with the ​ editorial board of the main local newspaper in San Diego talking about what fair and effective vacation rental policies could look like for the city. And at that point, as in most points at the beginning of a conversation around regulations. across the United States, there was really two, two sides of the equation, there was the pro vacation rental voice and there was the anti vacation rental voice and both sides of that conversation. Were very emotional and had good points to make in the dialogue. And over the course of five years, there was a lot of back and forth. A lot of the industry coming together to advocate for our interests and a lot of the opposition banging pots and pans about what they were concerned about in terms of the character of community and what have you. But about two years ago, the City Council actually passed an ordinance that effectively banned traditional Vacation Rentals across the city. And as you can imagine, San Diego has a long and illustrious history of welcoming vacation rentals, the industry there goes back over 100 years.

Matt Landau One of the ways that's helpful to plan and strategize as it relates to ​ things going wrong is looking out over time and looking across destinations. And looking at how certain advocacy groups have come to conclusions what kinds of long term solutions seem to stick. And there's probably no better person on our team with the perspective that's not inside of the vacation rental business or blog. But actually the producer of our podcast and all of our media concerns. Are you there super producer Stuart Hooper?

Superproducer Stuart Hooper (Mangofish Studios) I am here Yes. ​

Matt Landau I know you love it when we put you on the spot. ​

Superproducer Stuart Hooper (Mangofish Studios) Oh, yeah, my favorite ​ thing.

Matt Landau But share your theory about compromise and how as kind of a ​ long term keystone, it seems to characterize most of the destinations that have figured something out.

Superproducer Stuart Hooper (Mangofish Studios) Compromise is not my ​ favorite word, Matt. But I think it's going to be a word that we're going to all have to learn to love in the coming years here in the vacation rental industry.

Matt Landau I think the definition of compromise is both parties are ​ disappointed with the outcome.

Superproducer Stuart Hooper (Mangofish Studios) Yeah, exactly. We've ​ heard Phil tell us that there's 4000 municipalities with some kind of vacation rental regulations across the United States underway. It's definitely something that makes both parties a little edgy, because we've had this amazing decade of the growth of the vacation rental industry where it seemed like anything was possible. But now we're really finding these tough regulatory battles all over the country, especially in urban areas. And the good news is that we've seen these places like San Diego, where we went and filmed the show in 2018. amazing guests experience amazing vacation rental business, 14 employees. And they were like worried about their business going out of business at any moment, right, they're in this big battle with the city where like, at some point, the whole thing could just disappear. And that was a really weird space to operate in. So the good news is with a compromise, like what we've seen in San Diego, where Phil and Expedia went in and worked with a group of hosts, to create a memorandum of understanding with the city, and put a plan together that would legalize vacation rentals, but also create a much higher amount of restrictions that would please the ante groups. There's now a path for you to operate a vacation rental business in San Diego, and not be afraid of going out of business at any time, which is a very strange way to operate a business.

Phil Minardi (Expedia) We brought together a coalition of industry partners to ​ spend that point it was over a million dollars to collect signatures opposing the band that had passed, ultimately forcing the city council to rescind that ordinance and come back to the table and negotiate with us over the course of that two

years since that time, we've really been living with the proverbial Sword of Damocles hanging over the head of the entire industry. And we really needed certainty. We knew that there was a very vocal contingent of city council and members of the community that wanted to continue to ban traditional vacation rentals.

Phil Minardi (Expedia) So we thought it was important to get a stakeholder ​ group together to try and pass an ordinance that not only could be fair for traditional vacation rental owners and managers, but also could address some of the concerns that the community was vocalizing over the course of the last five years to truly come to a compromise that's going to span and kind of not something we're gonna have to re litigate over the course of the year, we were lucky, we had a city council member and Dr. Jen Campbell, who was a city council member there in San Diego, brought Expedia group to the table with Unite Here, which is the state's largest hotel union, and we started to have conversations over the course of the last few months, they were incredibly productive. Obviously, it's not not very often you get a large platform like Expedia group at the same table as a union, they have been on the other side of regulatory issues for vacation rentals than us for at least a decade at this point.

Phil Minardi (Expedia) So the idea of getting them to the table, getting a council ​ member champion to the table, and really talking about how we can move this conversation forward, especially in the light of COVID-19 was something we jumped at. So we went through a lot of negotiations with them. And we announced an agreement between ourselves and united here on a path forward for a comprehensive set of new rules for the vacation rental industry. They're in San Diego.

Dana Lubner Stuart, what does the flip side of this look like? ] ​

Superproducer Stuart Hooper (Mangofish Studios) Well, Dana, despite this ​ being a framework to save vacation rental businesses, there's no getting around the fact that overnight, many of them suddenly became illegal or untenable and no longer exist. And at the same time, you have anti groups still saying it's not enough and that they're going to keep fighting to make the laws more restrictive. So it's not a perfect solution and is a tough pill to swallow after everything we've

been through in this podcast. But I think it's the only way forward. Jonah mechanic of Seabreeze Vacation Rentals in San Diego is a prime example of a host who has found this path of compromise.

Jonah Mechanic (Seabreeze VR San Diego) You're going to need to grasp the ​ concept of a compromise. And a compromise means not everyone's going to get what they want. It's not going to be 100% one side and 0% the other side, it's going to be a true compromise. Look, we've been fighting this thing for seven years, and we're no better off today than we were seven years ago. In fact, we're worse today than seven years ago. Because we've wasted the last seven years bickering, and not really getting anything done. Meanwhile, that's seven years of permit fees that could be collected seven years of enforcement of the bad actors, seven years of really making sure that a neighbor who actually lives next to a bad short term rental gets relief.

Superproducer Stuart Hooper (Mangofish Studios) Dana can probably speak ​ to that a little bit in Denver. I mean, we've heard her talk about all the positive things that were accomplished with the good neighbor summit, with her joining the city board, this track board, they're no longer putting hosts in jail. So that's great. But they know it's not exactly a cakewalk in terms of operating a vacation rental businesses.

Dana Lubner Not at all, you know, as we did turn things around a bit, and they aren't ​ really where we would ideally like to see them for a sustainable feature of vacation rentals in our community. You know, we've had to continue to battle off regulation changes, we've had to witness before our eyes, nevermind because of the pandemic where hosts exit the market, but hosts continued to exit the market, because of the way that they are being investigated. Or being denied a license or having a really long wait time, you know, the COVID burden has put a tremendous strain on all cities across the country. And, you know, it's trickled into the way that our departments operate.

Dana Lubner So I think for a lot of the hosts in our community, it's just kind of left them ​ with a bad taste in their mouth, or they don't feel excited about the future of hosting within our community. And our communities need inventory, they need opportunities for travelers to stay at places more than ever now. So it's really an unfortunate thing to see this, you know, the numbers dwindling within our own community. And that's one of the reasons, we came up with the idea that we've discussed a little bit throughout the season. But for this secondary license type, it's called the type two license really fancy snazzy name there. But the license type would be for non primary residence license holders. And so this would allow for somebody to, you know, maybe spend half the year in another place in the world and spend half of the year or less in Denver, and when they're not at their place here, they can rent out and provide their home to travelers that come to our city and want to spend money.

Matt Landau I think it's important to point out that all destinations are different. ​ In terms of tourism, all destinations are different in terms of their maturity or development level. And there are going to be some destinations that are much more vulnerable than others. Whereas some of these destinations where short term rentals have always been a pillar of the economy, it's going to be much different. But I think something that's worth observing is in any destination, if you have not gotten to this point in your destination just yet, you likely will sometime soon. Until there are clear, compromised terms written into law, you will fill it forever have people on both sides of the argument pushing and pulling and threatening.

Matt Landau And, you know, everything that goes into real community issues. ​ And if you look at it like a partnership, it's a partnership between you and these other community members. It applies to all kinds of partnerships that compromise that something, some kind of solution that sits in the middle that everybody is at least slightly happy with. They see a little bit of their themselves reflected in, I think Stewart you've put your finger on something really powerful here. And that is also very simple. That until a destination does come to a compromise and until the stakeholders who perhaps have more to lose, relinquish a little bit of their control or at least compromise a little bit of their needs, until you get that it's forever stressful and intense.

Dana Lubner The reason why a lot of hosts are leaving the market and finding it really ​ kind of Feeling disillusioned about hosting in Denver is because of the primary residence requirement. And the way that the city is choosing to govern on whether they believe a property is your primary residence or not the primary residence language has been modified. And all these different variables were added in March, as I referenced earlier in this episode, as a way that they were saying was providing more leniency to the regulations. But what we're seeing is, depending on the number of days that you stay in your property is no longer on the table like it's not a specific hard and fast 183 days, you have to stay in your property in order for it to be a primary residence, they're still governing the amount of time that your calendar is available to be booked, when your license goes up for renewal. So you get a license for a one year term. And they say you have to be in your property and majority of that one year without a specific number of days.

Dana Lubner But how do you rent your property in a professionalized manner, when ​ you're living in your property for the majority of the year, and so it causes for a lot of hosts to maybe initially get that short term rental license? But the year later, when they go for that renewal, and the city looks at how many days they had their calendar open, they're oftentimes being sent an affidavit and possibly not hearing back from the city because they are overwhelmed for months and months. And they just sit there with that looming over their head, and oftentimes say, Hey, you know what, I can't do this anymore, and their property sits empty, or they get long term tenants in there, and then they can't use their home when they come back. So it's again, it's, it's because of the way that that primary residence is being enforced. That is really causing people to ultimately, you know, on top of the pandemic, just decide to get out of the market altogether.

Superproducer Stuart Hooper (Mangofish Studios) I think that's fascinating. ​ And also our experience in San Diego and Seattle plays out in a similar way. The city council was not suggesting an outright ban on vacation rental, they were simply suggesting that you'd only rent a certain number of days a year or it had to be your primary, or in some cases, you know, primary plus one secondary residence, and that would de facto outlaw Vacation Rentals for a lot of the professional managers with larger inventory. Now I know in Seattle, as we'll hear from Darik there, their business state of float, but the makeup of their inventory change from a few owners with many properties, each to many owners with a couple of properties each in order to fit the regulation. So it ended up being harder for owners that it was for the management company, but for a time it looked like it was going to basically destroy the management company as well. Dana, how is this affecting your inventory? I mean, I guess you guys maybe are using people that have that first year license and not the people that go to renew or is there some workaround? or What can you tell me about Effortless like how that's affecting your inventory?

Dana Lubner So not to be dramatic, the mass exodus of the market of hosts has ​ directly impacted my family business Effortless Rental Group. And it is definitely one of the driving factors that has motivated me to be part of the leadership team at the Mile High hosts and spending all this energy on trying to pursue new ways that we can have the short term rental inventory in our own market. And so you know, part of what we've done is pivoted more into the surrounding communities that are, you know, just a short drive away. But we've been in those markets for, you know, the majority of our business existence, but we've had to shift some of our own marketing efforts to put even more emphasis on those destinations that are possibly in the mountains and building out our team up there.

Dana Lubner So it's, it's been really challenging from a property management ​ perspective. You know, we've got clients that, you know, have really incredible unique stories, whether it's, they're taking a sabbatical in Germany for 18 months, or they are a flight attendant, and they want to give their kids an opportunity to travel around Europe for a couple years before they head into school. And their primary residence is here in Denver, they often will lock off a bedroom and leave all of their personal belongings in there and possibly their car in the garage. But the city is choosing to say during the term of that license, that one year license if you're in Europe, even if you don't have a solid destination where you're staying that your primary residence in that term, that one year term is no longer your home in Denver. And to me that is such a loss of sight of what we're really looking to prevent by creating aiding the primary residence regulation in the first place. And it's so it is something that really fires me up because of how short sighted I feel that it is. So what I'm working on right now with our group is to try to find a solution that still solves for all the ideas that the primary residence was trying to achieve, but actually raises the bar and improves things for all parties involved

Dana Lubner I am not going to go into that in detail here. I will talk about that more in ​ next week's episode.

Matt Landau And I don't want to completely ignore or skip over the fact that ​ there are legal actions that can be taken when something goes wrong, you definitely will not find any of us championing lawsuits as the first best practice in responding to unfair regulation. But we have come across instances of independent property owners stepping up and funding their own lawsuits and winning against the city.

Dana Lubner Here is Eric Bay, again, in New Orleans. ​

Eric Bay (ANP) We did take a series of legal measures where we did challenge ​ and we still have a case open, pending and ongoing in civil District Court here and then in state court, and then we'll move it to federal if necessary, where we're looking to at least grandfather, our previously licensed and legal listings. For our ANP membership of our over 2000 listings, we have maybe 500 that are actually licensed and legal at this point.

Matt Landau It's definitely not the path of least resistance. And again, we're not ​ going to dive into it here. But that is a path that we have seen taken, and should be considered, I suppose by any destination, depending on your enthusiasm levels, and the depth of your pockets.

Dana Lubner Our third big takeaway is that the road ahead will be one of compromise. ​ It's not always going to be pretty, but there are regulatory efforts underway all over the world. There are negative narratives about vacation rentals, and some are just hard to counter. You're going to have to work with government and anti groups to find a sustainable future, or you'll cease to exist. Compromise won't be worth it for everyone. But if you want to save your vacation rental business from unfair regulations, it is the way.

Dana Lubner Alright listener balls in your court. From this episode, I hope you've ​ learned that things will likely go wrong in your destination, because that's what we're seeing in almost every scenario we've studied. This considered discuss the worst case scenarios with your group. Draw up an emergency response plan that keeps morale high and stays true to your vision and sketch out what a true compromise might look like for your destination. And remember, a good litmus test for compromise is how well it reflects the counter arguments not just your own.

Dana Lubner If you're facing tough regulations and looking for motivation, feel free to ​ drop me an email at [email protected]

Dana Lubner I'm Dana Lubner. And thank you for listening. Stay tuned for next week's ​ episode, the big idea where we'll explore critical concepts for the industry that are only being tried in a few places.

Dana Lubner Please leave us a review or comment on your platform of choice. Make ​ sure you subscribe today so you don't miss a single episode.

For more help with your business, join the Inner Circle membership ​ ​

Ep. 9: Big Ideas

Dana Lubner So hey listener I just wanted to share with you I tried this crazy thing and ​ it worked. This whole advocacy thing takes some courage as well as leaps of faith. And when you're trying to understand how to chart New Territories or pursue a big idea, you really need to lean on others and ask others that have had successes, for advice. And so in this vein, I emailed the former Seattle Mayor last night, and asked if I could pick his brain because I wanted to learn what he dealt with when Seattle was passing some similar regulations that I'm trying to pursue with the Mile High Hosts here in Denver. And to my very surprise, he emailed me back today and said he would be happy to hop on a zoom call with me. So I just wanted to share that little success with you to inspire you that there is no reach that's too big, and to take those leaps of faith and ask people for help and I think you'd be surprised how many people are willing to help you out.

Dana Lubner From my friends at VRMB communities. This is How to Save Your ​ Vacation Rental Business. Attend part educational series about the do's and don'ts of sustainable short term rentals. This episode is brought to you by Track powered by Travel Net Solutions, providing integrated solutions to transform the way vacation rental hospitality works. This is episode nine big ideas. In this episode, we'll learn about a few of the big ideas I think are moving advocacy forward, and how to start thinking about your own big ideas. Hey, everybody, it's Dana lube nerd. And welcome to my show.

Matt Landau Dana. It's Matt here, Matt, Who? Matt Landau, Dana, co-host of ​ your podcast.

Dana Lubner How can I forget? I think it's that Turkey that Turkey got to me. ​

Matt Landau I was about to say you're just getting so popular these days that I ​ was going to ask if you arrived at your Thanksgiving table table by saying Hi, I'm Dana Lubner. And welcome to my show.

Dana Lubner There may have been some laughs along those lines that were ​ exchanged over the Thanksgiving meal, but I kept it pretty. Pretty cool.

Matt Landau Did you have a good Thanksgiving? ​

Dana Lubner I had a fantastic Thanksgiving. It was definitely a little different. But I ​ think that is what was to be expected for most people this year while it's we're dealing with some not so normal times that we're in. How about you?

Matt Landau I had a wonderful Thanksgiving. And my family agreed that it was ​ probably one of the most memorable Thanksgivings of all time, just because we all had a lot to be thankful for.

Dana Lubner I would have to say I share that sentiment as well with you a lot to be ​ thankful for and lots to reflect upon. And I think when you're going through a hardship, or things are not as they usually are, it really is an opportunity to see all of the blessings that we have and feel an abundance of gratitude. So right there with you.

Matt Landau All right, so all the blessings in gratitude ended yesterday and we ​ woke up today and we enter into your new world and back to normal in which you have this looming, and yet exciting. Potential next step for the Mile High Hosts. When you woke up this morning, did you immediately go into your big idea advocacy mode.

Dana Lubner I would like to say that I woke up knowing it was a day off and just ​ enjoying sleeping in but I think as soon as I woke up and my brain started firing up. The big idea that we're working on here in Denver made its way into my mind because we're definitely on somewhat of a countdown so to speak.

Matt Landau When I woke up this morning. I had a cranberry next to my pillow ​ that somehow made its way into my pocket.

Dana Lubner Wow, I would have never expected you to share that right now with us. ​

Matt Landau Yeah. So let's get into this big idea. A lot of people have been ​ listening to this podcast over the course of the last eight episodes, right? And they've learned a lot. We've covered almost everything. But this, this episode is going to be a little bit different because we're talking about stuff that hasn't been done before. And for those who have been following your type due to license, it's an exciting new way of defining formerly short term rentals in Denver. And when are you presenting that? When is the decision day?

Dana Lubner So the decision day could be, it's very unknown. But the first day that I ​ get a chance to officially present it to the Strack board, which we've referenced many times throughout the season, the short term rental Advisory Committee happens on Tuesday, December 8, at 4pm. So I'd say between now and then a lot of my time is being spent on strategizing to make sure that that delivery is nothing short. But amazing.

Matt Landau Dana Lubner, when we sat down to write the script for this ​ episode, I propose we call it small ideas. But you said that that wouldn't be compelling. You suggested big ideas, because in looking over so many interviews that we've done this season, across eight episodes, there were certain events that like, stood out to us that kind of moved the needle in any given destination. What does the big idea before we get into your type to license thing? What does it mean to you for a listener?

Dana Lubner So the beautiful thing about a big idea is that we don't have a hard and ​ fast definition as to what it means. But it's something that's kind of innovative, that's making impact or creating waves.

Matt Landau And oftentimes, it was something that was invented. Other times, ​ it's something that was improved upon. And oftentimes, it requires the support of many different stakeholders. But I think in all instances, it really made a difference. So Dana, before we get into your big idea, what are some examples that you found particularly noteworthy.

Dana Lubner One powerful approach is to provide government with the ordinance you ​ wish to see, oftentimes, they don't have a law in hand, and they're not sure what's worked elsewhere. By providing government with a template for a law that's fair for the industry in the community, you stand a much better chance of getting laws on the books that work for your business. Phil Minardi of Expedia group speaks well to this concept.

Phil Minardi (Expedia) In any given market, whether it's a big city or a coastal ​ destination, property managers are the expert. They are the experts in the industry. They are the experts in what good actors look like, what good policies look like. They are the professionals, that should have a seat at the table when policies are being created. But all too often, property managers get a little bit intimidated about engagement with an elected official. It's important for us to recognize we are the experts. We are the ones that understand our industry better than anybody else. And we can't cede that expertise to the NIMBYs or the hotel lobby or anybody else. It doesn't end well. So we have to recognize that we are the ones that know the most about our industry and how to regulate it in a fair manner. And the reality is that once you understand that you also recognize that elected officials are our neighbors and your council member. And Dana, I know you feel this working in Denver, your council member, the mayor, the governor, the senator, their job is to hear from you. They want to hear from you. So if we can, as an industry, start to get over that fear, get over that intimidation, and view our elected officials as our neighbors and view ourselves as the experts, then it's easier to help shape the direction of policy that's imposed upon our community moving forward.

Dana Lubner Phil is also a great one to reach out to for examples of already written ​ regulations that have worked in other areas if you need those resources. Email is in our show notes. I know Eric Bay has had trouble in the last year in New Orleans. And as we said last episode, even when you do everything right things can and will go wrong. With that said, For many years, New Orleans was a model for the nation in terms of vacation rental regulations. And this was because of a proactive approach from the host group that included providing the city with a template for the ordinance they would create. Eric and ANP literally went to the city and said, there are no regulations regulate us, let's make this legal. And because of that, they were able to shape the regulations in a way that would be fair for everyone.

Eric Bay (ANP) No one has any experience in policy, not successful policy, ​ because this is all still so new. So what we've found is that we as well as the elected officials, they're open to suggestions, because right now they're only

taking suggestions from other failed policies or maybe other successful policies in other jurisdictions. So there is no cookie cutter template. They're just "oh, okay, that might work here." Uh, we saw that the mayor in Seattle adopted this. Great. Okay, we saw that the San Diego recommended this, this was proposed in so by coming to those elected officials with many suggestions that are practical and data backed, we were hopefully going forward and has successfully in the past have been able to shape and influence our own policy desired policy outcome because they didn't want to write an ordinance. We completely wrote drafted several times to completely wrote the first ordinance. We had to redo it nine times. But it was in the exact same form that we handed in. And that was, practically what was what was signed. Now they tweaked it made it you know, but their words on it. But we did that.

Dana Lubner In the same vein of a proactive approach to regulations is another big ​ idea, which is a proactive approach to taxation. In places like Seattle and New Orleans hosts standing up and saying, tax us we want to contribute we want to be legal has helped their position with the city. Directing those taxes to low income housing funds has further help defuse one of the most common negative narratives about the vacation rental industry. Here's Eric on how that works in New Orleans.

Eric Bay (ANP) We offered up initially to be taxed six years ago when nobody ​ was taxing these we offered in a an affordable housing fund to our now Mayor then city council woman Latoya Cantrell, again said, Look, if some would say that this is taking housing units off the market, less help with the preservation or even the creation of housing units and earmark money to an affordable housing fund where it's six and a half million dollars that we've collected, since that went into effect. Just be earmarked for affordable housing, internally within our board and our membership when we talked about how to how do we counter the argument of affordable housing, we realized that we needed to be diplomatic and tactful because I would always say, you know, I've rent our branded vacation rentals and taking vacations everywhere with my children all over the world. And there's nothing affordable about the houses that I rent. And while that sounds a little privilege, you know, wasn't gonna resonate well with the elected officials as well as the audience members in that public forum.

Eric Bay (ANP) You know, the truth of the matter is that a vacation rental home ​ is a unique experience. And it's not necessarily a property that was ever or will

ever be in the either rental arena or certainly not the affordable rental arena. Acknowledging that this house is in the community and the owners are in the community. We also realize that we're vested, we're stakeholders in this community. We understand that there are real problems that exist in a city crime, infrastructure and affordable housing being one of them as a way to offset the underfunded needs that the city could currently provide. We would like to offer an additional taxation going forward of an X dollar per we said $2 per night they opted for $1 per night, so that we could earmark money that is collected from taxes just like a hotel tax would be on occupancy tax.

Eric Bay (ANP) So that you X city person city council member, Madam Mayor, ​ can earmark and work with these very groups that are here. Today crying and asking for your help, and we could make lemonade out of what's unperceived as lemons? Well, that argument worked, because who was funding this NIF, which was a neighborhood housing improvement fund. When I talked to them, Councilwoman Latoya Cantrell, there was $110,000 in that NIF fund $110,000 in that fund, and it had zero additional sources of revenue coming in. Why not when we said we could put $2 per night in this fund, and generate about $1.5 million a year. She was all ears, because that wasn't going to cost them anything. It wasn't going to cost us anything. The hotel association was going to love it too, because anything they could do to add. If they were if, unfortunately, we were going to be made legal and licensed. Well, they certainly want us to be taxed more than they were.

Dana Lubner The argument that short term rentals are driving up long term rent prices ​ in Seattle is a huge anti narrative. And though the numbers show short term rentals are not the core of an arguable housing problem. Darik Eaton explains how their self taxation and contribution to low income housing fund has helped the narrative.

Darik Eaton The Seattle fight was all about affordable, affordable housing. And ​ the thought process was that, you know, these operators that had hundreds of properties were taking affordable housing units off of the market. And so the way that the city went about dealing with that, that ended up working out Okay, so at least we're still in business today was that they limited the number of properties any one person could have to basically one, one vacation rental, and then they could also rent out their primary residence. The reason behind why it worked out was that we suggested taking the difference between our normal sales tax rate

and the hotel tax rate and basically self imposing the hotel tax rate and saying that city and Seattle use that as a funding mechanism for affordable housing. And so by basically giving that by being a partner in the solution that they at least thought we were causing havoc with created an opportunity where the city had a had a funding mechanism and it's really their only ongoing permanent funding mechanism for affordable housing. Airbnb also negotiated with the city and started remitting tax on the behalf of hosts. So that was part of the overall I guess, negotiation strategy that came about it was during the art legislative fight. So that made it a lot easier for a lot of Airbnb hosts at least to have that tax get collected and remitted.

Dana Lubner My type two license pushed in Denver is not technically a self tax, but ​ creating a higher licensing fee from $150 to $1,000. And building in a designated fund is also a way of helping drive revenue for the city and getting their attention. Designated funds are a subset of the general fund and would be assigned for a specific purpose. Currently, all lodging tax revenue goes into the general fund and it's not assignable to a specific activity. bad actors ultimately drive one of the other main negative narratives about the vacation rental industry. For every crazy Airbnb party in the news, there's a host somewhere that might have been able to prevent it. For every angry neighbor anti group. There are usually noise, nuisance parking and waste management concerns that turned them into activists. figuring out a way to self police, our industry and weed out bad actors would be a huge step forward to improving our overall industry narrative and our relationship with community groups. Claire Reisweig of sand and sea in Galveston has one of the best self policing policies I've seen. Her host group garm finds its members for violations hires off duty police officers to patrol and resolve disputes. And all of this helps her maintain good relations with anti groups and government.

Claire Reisweig (GARM) We are an organization of six property management ​ companies who abide by common rules and regulations. Share a 24 hour patrol service of off duty police officers. So our common rules and regulations that we have is that we all share the same registration form and the same, I think we call it now the guest code of conduct. And our guests are filling out the same information names, ages, the cars that are going to be there, and they agree to the rules that we have set up that literally have been changed by only one thing that the city asked us to add in. But over all these years, we're going on 15 years, only one thing has been added to that guest Code of Conduct form. We all agree to pay our hotel tax on time, we all agree that we're going to have 24, seven contacts, we all agree that if our patrol officer calls, we'll be there within the hour to handle anything that needs to be handled. We're all local companies, we are

very much on the ground, we have offices, and we're there to make sure that we are good neighbors to all of the areas where we do business.

Dana Lubner Ultimately, the Galveston model may be difficult to implement at scale ​ and other larger destinations. One of the best explanations I've heard of the challenge of self policing comes from David Krauss of Rent Responsibly.

David Krauss (Rent Responsibly) Yeah, I mean, I think this idea of bad apples ​ and bad actors gets a lot of play. And it's it's, I don't I frankly don't like the conversation in the first place. Because it's the broad brush, good bad, like, what are we talking about here? I think fundamentally, we need to raise the standard. And that's a more of a self directed self imposed concept than waiting for government or otas, or somebody else on high to come down and give us the commandments of how we should behave. That's not how it works. So I think fundamentally, recognizing that, you know, just not being a bad actor makes you a good afternoon, that that dichotomy just doesn't work for me. So, I think the idea is, you need to be extremely aware of the fact that if you want to remotely managing your property, that there is inherent risk in doing that. And if you are not mitigating those risks, such that you are not reliant on your neighbors as first line of defense period. Period, it should be a self sufficient if things go wrong situation, then I would consider you a good actor that can have a really bad day and be that story and city hall. Do you want to do that?

David Krauss (Rent Responsibly) No? Well then do something about it ahead ​ of time. So a little bit of it is just Are you prepared? Have you had foresight to be taken action, because you know, the law of averages would say you're also talking to a guy who had one party that led to noise aware and I was two miles away, had I known about it, I would have walked over there and told the college kids that came in fleeced me when I told him to get lost, but I didn't know about it. And so my first you know, action in that regard was how do I prevent this next time, etc, etc. So the idea of good actor, bad actors really prepared actor unprepared actor, in my opinion. And in some cases in our industry, we just haven't defined what it means to be or what the expectations are of responsibility. So it's hard to call somebody a quote, bad actor. Oh, I had 500 good reservations and then one that terrorize the neighborhood. I think that's unacceptable. I mean, that's a, that's one really big problem. I don't care that you had 500. good ones,

like the world changes, we need to evolve and be more prepared over time and set that expectation.

Dana Lubner Ultimately, the self policing area of the industry is ripe for more big ideas. ​ Do you have one who better to regulate us than those that understand the industry best? The great thing about big ideas is once a precedent is set, a statewide law passed an mo use such as we've seen in San Diego, a law that really seems to be working for all sides of an issue. These big ideas can be exported to more and more places with less resistance than they may have seen the first time around. That's why it's absolutely critical to stay up on what other hosts groups are doing well. And to always be brainstorming what you can achieve with your own big ideas.

Dana Lubner Our first big takeaway is invent your own big idea. A creative approach to ​ your community based advocacy is powerful. If you're feeling boxed in by a compromise Eyes are just need to shake things up in your community, try inventing your own big idea. Many times governments need you to lay things out for them in order to get things done. This is where the biggest innovation strides are made. Don't forget, this is a young industry, nowhere near every big idea has been thought of or tried. Hey, Matt, are you still there?

Matt Landau I'm still here, Dana. ​

Dana Lubner Awesome. One of the things that I really admire about you is your ability ​ to reach over the aisle and connect with people that maybe would be considered an anti group, or connect with the big business of short term rentals, and find ways to better understand the businesses on the other side of the argument?

Matt Landau Well, I appreciate that. And I wouldn't say so much, and the ability ​ as much as recognizing a reality, which is that in any given destination, you're stuck there, with everybody, including those who don't completely agree with you. If you don't reach out to somebody who has an opposing viewpoint, especially the individuals or groups who are most vehemently against what you do, your life becomes really stressful and complicated. And it's very unlikely that you're able to come to a consensus that benefits everybody in the destination. So I would consider it more just a way of thinking, going against the grain. When we first

reached out to Jessica Black. She was honest in saying that no vacation rental groups had ever reached out to moms against short term rentals. And that's both not surprising, because who would want to reach out against your number one opposition, but at the same time in those conversations, since we have found that the requests are not at all unreasonable?

Jessica Black (Moms Against Short Term Rentals) You know, I've been to so ​ many meetings at the state level in the city level, and the arguments, there isn't a lot of benefit for neighbors. There's a lot of costs imposed on neighbors, but there isn't a lot of benefit. Because instead of having real neighbors, instead of having community, I've got a business next door. I'm having to pay for enforcement issues. I'm, you know, losing kids, for my kids to play with. Just I hear the arguments. And I think I read data that you have a marketing background. And I always think to myself, like from a marketing perspective, nobody has been able to tell me what's in this for me.

Dana Lubner You heard it listeners, when thinking about reaching out to these groups, ​ ask yourself, what's in it for them? But Matt, go on? How exactly do we do this?

Matt Landau While I would encourage anybody listening to identify the groups, ​ or the individuals in your destination who are on the opposite end of the spectrum. It's also worth recognizing that there are some groups. And I like to use Airbnb as a punching bag just because they're the biggest and most successful that we kind of have to figure out some way to coexist. You know, I used to say that unfair regulation was the number one threat for all professional vacation rental businesses. But something I've learned in this podcast with you, Dana, in our interviews is that Airbnb, and their impact on any given community is driving the unfair regulation for the professional sector of our industry. And they have demonstrated time and time again, that the professional management community is not their priority it may have used to be.

Matt Landau In fact, I had some of the earliest conversations with Airbnb ​ executives about how to welcome in the professional vacation rental community into the platform. But from the refund scandal in the wake of COVID neighborhoods that are really struggling, Airbnb lobbyists that are stepping into certain destinations and making agreements behind closed doors without the professional managers input. I think they've just proven with their actions that professional managers are lower down on their list. And that's not wrong. For any corporation, you get to choose who are your stakeholders and who you're going to prioritize that will help you earn money. But what impact it's having is neighborhoods that are changing without the voices of the people who are doing it properly. And party houses that are not being held accountable. If Airbnb really wanted to eliminate their party house issue, I'm pretty sure the smart folks there with the amount of money that they have, I'm pretty sure that they could figure that out. But they haven't. We see shootings taking place regularly. We see the same party houses, hosting parties over and over again, not being removed from the platform, even despite their new policy, that they don't have a one strike policy.

Matt Landau I just think that there must be some other reason that these illegal ​ or problematic actors have not been removed from those platforms. And the only thing I can come up with is that it would affect their inventory. And by inventory, I mean, the amount of listings they have on their platform, that, of course drives their bookings. And that is immediately correlated to their push to go public. So when I see the way Airbnb handles our issues, and I see it's not a priority, I then realized that that is actually a bigger problem for us than unfair, very unfair regulation that we were discussing. In fact, if you were to remove Airbnb from this entire equation, we probably wouldn't have this problem. But of course, that's wishful thinking. I know super producer Stuart Hooper doesn't agree with me entirely on this, but I'm a little bit out of breath here. I need a sip of Gatorade, Stewart, what's your take?

Superproducer Stuart Hooper (Mangofish Studios) I can't really disagree ​ with you on anything that you're saying about Airbnb, it's not that I think there's really any hill left to defend them on in terms of being you know, a shining light for the vacation rental industry. What worries me is if we (and by we, I mean, this audience and us here is kind of professional vacation rental hosts) if we decided that we're going to do things better, and then we're going to do all the things we've heard about in this podcast. And we're going to organize ourselves. And we're going to get it in the media and we're going to go down to City Hall. And we're going to say we're not Airbnb, we're this other thing. And we want to be treated like this other thing, like the responsible corporate citizens that we are and the responsible community members that we are, if there's 800 of us in that community, and there's 10,000, Airbnb hosts. I don't know that we get treated separately, I think it ends up being a conversation about Airbnb, no matter what

we do. And the bad news there is that you know, from their latest IPO filings, I think it's like 79% of Airbnb hosts have a single property, many if not most of them. That's their primary residence. Yeah. So it's a different business than a lot of the businesses that we're talking about. And the regulations that Airbnb might go forward for that user base are not necessarily going to be super friendly for us. And that's not great news. But the only takeaway I have from that is we've got to find a way to work with Airbnb, save Airbnb from itself. I don't really know. I think this is an area that's ripe for a big idea. All I know is if we decide Airbnb is turning into a negative force for the industry, and like we just need to act differently. I'm not sure that's going to be enough. I think we have to take Airbnb in account in our conversations. And I would love for someone to come up with a big idea about how to better handle that.

Matt Landau You know, it would be nice if we invited some of the executives ​ from Airbnb to participate in this podcast so they could share their perspective! Oh, wait, we already did that. And they chose not to participate..

Matt Landau Dana, are you still there? ​

Dana Lubner Yes, I'm here. ​

Matt Landau Sorry, Stuart, and I got into a heated battle. What's your thoughts? ​

Dana Lubner I know, you two could go on forever. But my biggest thought about all of ​ this is that in order for us to weed out the bad actors or the illegal listings, I think it's really important for the hosting community, to reach out to the otas, for them to really emphasize the importance of the role that they need to play in this equation, and that the power, a lot of the power that they carry, is able to make a difference. And I think it comes down to, you know, having platform accountability, so working within with the destinations. So if there's a permit number required on a listing, and that listing doesn't have a permit number, it would make sense that that listing would not be able to process transactions, you know, there is a responsibility other than just being a marketplace of accountability. And it goes on beyond that. But I think that would be a great start of us all working together.

Matt Landau And that would give any municipality a very easy path to ​ enforcement, look on the platform, see if the listing has a permit number, if set destination has permits, verify that the permit is valid, and move on. That's like not too much to ask from a behemoth that has created a major issue.

Dana Lubner I think the more pushback there is, the more polarity it creates, and the ​ more of this tug of war, this us versus them, that continues to grow legs, and then ruins the reputation of the entire hosting community. And so if we can, you know, try to get to the root of these problems, it's going to show a higher compliance rate, more successful enforcement. And there's going to be, I think, a bit more peace among all of the players that are in this space. And now a word from our sponsor. Track Hospitality Software, powered by Travel Net Solutions transforms your vacation rental company, so you can transform the way vacation rental advocacy plays out in your region. Track provides software solutions to decrease your technology footprint to save you time, money, and resources. In fact, track was recognized by VRMB's Keystone awards as the software of the future. And by aligning with a podcast like this one, the goal is for track partners to then devote that newly freed up time, profits and resources towards banding together against even bigger challenges, like unfair vacation rental regulations.

Dana Lubner So when thinking about hugging your haters, I think something that ​ translates really well and closely along these lines is when you have an opportunity to give back in your community and giving back to the community is something that can really help change the narrative of the big mean vacation rental business. Matt, I know you've seen some great examples of these big giving back ideas in your travels. Can you tell me about some of them?

Matt Landau Yeah, I love the idea of giving back more than just because it's a ​ great thing to do. It's a responsible thing for any small business to consider about the environment in which they operate. But what I really like about it as it relates to regulation is that you're really demonstrating that you're in this for the right reasons. You're not here for the quick buck. You're here for the long haul. And you want to build something that lasts and you want it to be part of the community that your guests love to come and enjoy.

Matt Landau Some quick examples of vacation rental companies who are ​ actively giving back in a way that earns them all kinds of goodwill. helina sideris,

from Park City Lodging in Utah, they add $1 on to every booking, they explain to their guests that that $1 will be I believe it's $1 per night actually will be donated to the local land trust to preserve the very environment in which visitors to Utah enjoy. they've raised hundreds of 1000s of dollars over the years and that money goes directly into a cause that everybody gets to enjoy. Another great example of the environment is Bob Garner and his partner in Italy Casal dei Fichi. They have a program in which they have secured discounts from local restaurants that their guests frequent. That discounted cash gets donated directly into a funnel. Plants trees to offset the footprint that it costs to get that guest there in the first place, whether it was on the plane, or otherwise. Michelle Ruber, in Portland, Maine, who just does so many amazing community activities from the event in which she has a block party for all the local businesses and neighbors to come out and support one another, to her program in which she literally trains refugees in housekeeping, but also gives them the chance to give cooking classes with their cuisine from home to her guests when they're in town.

Matt Landau I just think these kinds of initiatives speak volumes about the intent ​ of a vacation rental professional in the destination. And I think it's less about the amount of money that can be raised. And more about the perception and the way that you are seeing in your local community, if you're doing these things to give back. Chances are when things get hairy, you've earned enough social capital, that at least you can have a real conversation. The opposite, of course, would be companies that are headquartered elsewhere, or that haven't given back to the local community that have only taken in the form of booking dollars. Those companies tend to have a real uphill battle when it comes to local regulatory issues because they haven't. Their reputation, and their behavior doesn't precede them. And each of those companies that I mentioned, by the way, are part of our esteemed star throwers, community. It's a group of socially and environmentally responsible vacation rental professionals. And if anyone listening would like to learn more, you can head over to our website, thestarthrowers.com

Dana Lubner One of my favorite giving back examples is that humans have short term ​ rentals piece that RentResponsibly wrote about Steve Patterson of your home in Philly -- "your hip" for short -- originally set up his short term rentals to host business travelers, but he then discovered an even greater need for short term rentals, housing families of patients at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia CHOP.

Dana Lubner Whenever there are kids involved. It's not just the kid that comes into the ​ hospital. He says it's the whole family. Mom and Dad need a support system. Brothers and sisters and Nan and granddad unite to help out the children. Chop and other hospitals used to recommend hotels to families like these, but they pushed back noting that hotels didn't provide enough space or needed amenities like kitchens and washers and dryers. Instead, they found your hip once social workers at the hospitals began hearing about them about how great their homes were. Steve and your hip began working together with them to provide patient accommodations. The partnership continue to grow when your hip began receiving calls about other families who needed accommodations but couldn't afford them.

Dana Lubner So Steve started a charitable fund where 5% of every booking that came ​ from the hospital would be put back into a pool. The social workers could use those funds at their discretion to help families with accommodations, groceries and other needs. In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis year, HIPAA began extending significant discounts to hospitals to help them rehouse patients. The company is also giving frontline health care professionals free stays up to five nights and discounts if they need to stay longer. This is a beautiful example of giving back in our own communities. Our second big takeaway is to hug your haters otas aren't always going to have your interests at heart, but they're a big part of the conversation. Anti groups may seem impossible to work with at first, but they're usually just trying to improve their communities. Your haters may be offstage and just want to resolve a problem. They may be onstage vocal and in the public eye. Finding ways to give back to your community is a holistic way to show your true intentions and gives you a lot of credibility when you need it.

Matt Landau Okay, Dana, I know listeners are on the edge of their seats. I want ​ you to walk us through this big type to license idea. But first, I'm curious for your process. The advice that you're giving to folks in terms of how to implement a big idea like this.

Dana Lubner So I'm going to outline some of the steps below. But this isn't like a hard ​ and fast outline that you have to follow. So step number one is First, you need to get a big idea. dream big. Think about a future that can have balance and sustainability for the industry, and work your way backwards from there. Step two, pick your dream team to work on this big idea with so if your leadership team is 10 people, that's too many cooks in the kitchen. Choose a group that's a small size, say maybe three or four people. Step three, research, collect, consume and gather data and examples to support your big idea. Ask the short term rental community for introductions and pick the brains of those that have made great achievements. Step Four. Build your outline, you need to build an outline of the idea and include all of the little details. But don't be afraid to parking lot some of the elements so they don't hold up your progress, you can always go back to ideas left in the parking lot if needed. Step Five. Next, you'll want to create a timeline. So map out your plan of action and reverse engineer your success story. Step six. gather feedback from Pro and anti audiences. Make sure you're considering all perspectives and make adjustments based on what you learn. And most important step seven, don't forget to make a plan B.

Matt Landau So I understand the big idea here is to create a brand new type ​ two license that kind of comes out of the blue and disarms people in a way that existing stuff hasn't been able to achieve. What are the actual mechanics of it? For those who are wondering like, what is this type two license actually look like when you lift the curtain,

Dana Lubner The difference of this type two license from our current primary ​ residence requirement is the main one right right out of the door is that it's not required to be your primary residence. Some of the other elements include things like you're only allowed to have one license per person. And so we're doing that to hopefully help, you know, mitigate the likelihood of, you know, arbitrage taking place. So one purpose and another big difference. And because this was born out of an idea, to provide a roadmap to recovery for our city, it has a much higher license fee.

Dana Lubner So it's at $1,000 as a license fee compared to $150. With the current ​ license fee. Additionally, the property ownership, you need to be the homeowner in order to get the secondary license type, our current license, you could be a tenant or a homeowner. And then another really big important one is that it's capped off at a total of 1000 licenses. And that is to ensure that we're not exceeding more than 1% of the overall housing inventory, and wanting to diminish the likelihood of having impact on housing affordability here in Denver. You know, right now, you there can be an uncapped amount of primary residence license types. Another two other things that I think are pretty cool about it is that we have a responsible host certification requirement. And that would be a training course that every operator listed on this license would be required to complete.

Dana Lubner So they will be learning about things like responsible COVID, cleaning ​ noise monitoring devices, upgrading your trash bins to a larger size, you know, good guest practices, good neighbor practices, maximum occupancy recommendations, really ensuring that the fabric of the neighborhood is kept intact, because it is professional career hosts that are operating versus the occasional host that leaves once every, you know, for maybe two to three, four weeks out of a year that really doesn't know the best practices out there to ensure that they're operating responsibly. And then there's a designated fund. So that would be between one and $3 per night. That's paid for by the guests that would go to a specific, you know, area of need within our community. So all together this type two license will generate approximately $7 million in incremental revenue to our city government.

Matt Landau You know what I love most about this everything that you describe ​ kind of encapsulates some of the best learning points that I have observed over the course of our season. It's almost like you picked and chose the best pieces, the most reasonable pieces that would fit for your destination, and put a nice bow on it and projected and outcome thinking back to our episode with Alex, in which you're actually projecting a storyline $7 million? How could I turn that down?

Dana Lubner That's exactly what we're going for. And that's exactly what I'll be ​ presenting to, you know, members of the public and this strap board on December 8. So for everyone that's listening to this episode before to Jim, they attend, yes. And that's what I want to ask...

Dana Lubner That's what I'd love to ask listeners to do. So if you are listening before ​ December 8. This is a meeting that's taking place online. So it's a zoom meeting. And my goal is to have 100 people of the public, you can be just simply there as a supporter of the industry, that would be you know, in attendance to the zoom meeting. And I want to show an outpouring of people there. And one of my goals is to say, for everyone, knowing that not everyone's going to be able to get a chance to speak at public comment that happens at the end of the meeting, is to say during my presentation where I get to outline this type to license, everybody in it, that's an attendance, raise your little zoom hand and you have a little raise your hand feature, if you are in support of the secondary license type. And I think that is going to be a demonstration of solidarity that this is a reasonable endeavor for us to consider and to pursue. And it would just be a really strong representation. So I invite everybody that's local, not local. to please show up to that meeting. I will include those details in the show notes of this podcast.

Matt Landau I love this. For any listener who has enjoyed Dana's deep dive into ​ advocacy this season. This is a little way to give back. And I think it's also a fun way to see an experiment that we've been following actually presented in public to the real life. So Dana, I will be there. I will raise my zoom little zoom hand in support of you and I hope that we see other how to save your vacation rental business listeners to very cool.

Dana Lubner Our final takeaway is in order to implement a game changing idea that ​ moves the needle forward in your destination, run it like a campaign, you need to have a plan, build a roadmap and pick a team to tackle it with. And don't forget to include a backup plan in case it all goes wrong. These are the very words I'm living by right now as I pursue my type two license. Okay, listeners the ball is in your court. If you don't come up with a big idea, no one will copy something you've heard today. invent it yourself. Reach out to someone who's done it before and ask for advice to fit your destination. Create a campaign to give back and earn a cache of goodwill for when it really matters. And remember, no one is going to do this for you and your destination. Get proactive and put these plans in place now before it's too late.

Dana Lubner We'd like to give a shout out to Minut for helping get the word out minute ​ is one of the leading privacy safe Smart Home monitoring solutions that tracks noise, motion and temperature empowering hosts worldwide to keep their properties safe. And neighbors happy to learn more at Minut.com. If you have a big idea you'd like to discuss, please reach out at [email protected]. And thank you for listening. Please stay tuned for next week our final episode The future of advocacy. Please leave us a review or comment on your platform of choice. Make sure you subscribe today so you don't miss a single episode.

For more help with your business, join the Inner Circle membership ​ ​

Ep. 10: Where Do We Go From Here

Alex Lawson Don't do it all yourself. There's a sort of hubris that some people ​ have that they have to do everything, the first thing that everyone should do is look into who's doing work that you can plug into. Because systems are more powerful than people. If you are part of an organized assembly of people, you're much more powerful than just by yourself. So the first thing that people should do is just realize that they're not alone and try to find their allies and comrades and neighbors, because it's easy to ignore one person's voice. But when 1000s of us are standing together, it's impossible to ignore our voices together.

Paige Teel (NEVRP) We need to go forward, and we need to start keep working ​ towards a common goal. And I feel like if we don't act, then we're not moving. And we're not going to get to where we need to be as an industry, which is what we're fighting for. And I've tried very hard, you know, from a very young age to realize that I do have influence and I have a voice. And I need to use that and whatever avenue and wherever I am to do something for others, but also for myself to take that personal responsibility.

Patricia Moore (Citizens for STR) We are just an incredible community. And ​ we are so large, and people just don't know that there really is somebody out there that wants to help them and I really do. That's a big part of it. People need to know that they can reach out to somebody and they'll reach back because that has not been the case for so many. They just don't even know what to do where to start. So I definitely want to be that voice times a million for every single house that is out there.

Dana Lubner From my friends at VRMB communities. This is how to save your ​ vacation rental business, a 10 part educational series about the do's and don'ts of sustainable short term rentals. This episode is brought to you by Track powered by Travel Net Solutions providing integrated solutions to transform the way vacation rental hospitality works. This is Episode 10: Where do we go from here? In this episode, we're going to flashback and recap the highlights of the season. After listening to all of the interviews and episodes, we'll share our super takeaways. And here's some words of wisdom on the possibilities of what the future holds. Hi, I'm Dana Lubner. And welcome to my show.

Matt Landau Hi, Dana Lubner. ​

Dana Lubner Hey, Matt Landau, how's it going? ​

Matt Landau I'm a little bit sad, to be honest. ​

Dana Lubner Tell me more. ​

Matt Landau Well, it's our last episode of the season. ​

Dana Lubner Yeah, I'm right there with you. It's bittersweet. ​

Matt Landau Do you remember when we first had a conversation like in the ​ wake of COVID, about doing something that would put a little bit more control back into our lives of uncertainty?

Dana Lubner I remember the moment like it was yesterday. Absolutely. ​

Matt Landau And we basically decided that podcasting was one of the few ​ activities that COVID couldn't stop. And we also decided that advocacy and regulation was a topic that was probably going to get worse. And we smushed those two dynamics together with what I thought was a pretty simple idea at the beginning, but this has proven to be quite the ride with you.

Dana Lubner Yeah, it's been a ride, I think is a great way to frame it. And it's one that I ​ couldn't be more honored to be on with yourself and with Stu. And as you said, this year kind of presented an opportunity, but it also presented an obligation. And so I think we grabbed the bull by the horns, and we sure as hell went on a ride.

Matt Landau And for those who are maybe listening for the first time, our goal is ​ for this episode to be shared the most widely of any episode. So if you're a regular listener, please do consider sharing this episode with your local vacation rental community because we're gonna aim to go through in the first part, at least everything that we have already addressed in the first nine episodes of this season. And one of the things Dana, we haven't really shared with folks just yet is that we kind of, we reverse engineered these 10 episodes, to be a learning process. It's not just 10 random themes. They're sequential lessons that anybody, whether they're entering into the advocacy space or stuck in some kind of advocacy pickle can revert back to as kind of like a blueprint, a set of steps to follow. That is not only sound across all the amazing interviews we've done, they're common denominators, and they all kind of agree that these steps are critical, and in this particular order, but I think really action oriented. I mean, your one rule to me at the beginning of this project was, this is not going to be a fluffy podcast, I want to dig into the details and the action, did we satisfy your need?

Dana Lubner Yes, absolutely. I think that that was so important to me. And with ​ working with the both of you, it couldn't have felt more action oriented, for me on this side of things. And I really hope it was inspiring action with the listeners. And honestly, I plan on going back and listening to my own podcasts to get inspiration later. Because it's when your surroundings change, and you go back and you reread a book, or reread a quote or rewatch a movie or whatever. Your perspective is oftentimes from a different seat in the stands, and it can take a whole new meaning for you. So I invite listeners to pull pieces out of the season where there may be facing a specific challenge. And they'll probably find new meaning. And I intend to do that myself.

Matt Landau One piece of advice, Dana, if you're planning on listening to your ​ podcast somewhere in public, like maybe you're sitting next to somebody on a park bench, just make sure that they know that you're listening to yourself. You're on the podcast, that's always important to point that out, Dana, for those who haven't listened to the first nine episodes, and for those who have, I was thinking we should do a little season recap, and not walk through just the steps that are integral in a sustainable advocacy campaign. But some of our biggest lessons, what do you say,

Dana Lubner I would love nothing more than to do that with you. ​

Matt Landau Episode One was the wake up call, it was basically underscore ​ underscoring the fact that advocacy has to be done, and that it's definitely not easy and nobody has been trained in it, but that it does work when you do it. And that it's this ongoing thing that never stops.

Dana Lubner I repeat those words to myself on a daily basis. That hits home for me. ​ from Episode One, we went into something that really hit home for me, which was Episode Two, my journey into advocacy. This is where I talk about how I relatively recently got into advocacy. And similarly to my story, it's important for the listener On this episode, to remember that whether it's your company or a company you work for anyone has the potential to become a key player in this advocacy fight. And it just takes passion combined with an inciting incident to be that wake up call for you that gets your journey in motion.

Matt Landau And every destination is going to have a different level of ​ advocacy organization going on there may be one already in your destination you may need to put one together that kind of segwayed into episode three go together which was just that about recognizing that we have to go with our competitors and this episode started off with that wonderful quote if you want to go fast go alone. If you want to go far...

Dana Lubner Go together. ​

Matt Landau That's right and host meetings they need to happen on a regular ​ basis. Otherwise you don't have a way to to address new concerns.

Dana Lubner And I love in this episode how we even take that going together to the ​ next level of outside of your hosting group. To building relationships into your community and with government representatives from there, in Episode Four, we talk about the big day. And another one that was really impactful in my own journey was planning an event that changes the narrative. And specifically in this episode, we talk about the good neighbor summit. And this wasn't an option for us to do this. This was something that we had to do because the narrative had gone so far south. And we break down the different elements to have a successful event in order to accomplish the goal of changing a narrative.

Matt Landau And this one was cool, Dana, because we were reflecting back on ​ your first Good Neighbor summit. But it also set the stage for your second virtual Good Neighbor Summit. And you walk us through exactly how it is done. I thought that was a really important thing for any destination, who wants that reset, that gave way into Episode Five money, which we were going to call this episode. Money, cash, hooosts. Well, we decided to call it money, because we're simple. And that episode was about running your advocacy group, like a business, ie generating a profit, because otherwise, it simply will not be sustainable. No matter how passionate you are, if you don't have income coming in, if you're not structured around some kind of model that keeps you financially afloat, you will burn out.

Dana Lubner And you challenged me prior to this episode to consider adding member ​ dues for my own hosting community. And the funny thing is, as much as I was resistant to it, I came to the truth that this is absolutely the next step that we need to take. And the funny thing is that after our good neighbor summit event that happened, our second annual Good Neighbor Summit, I had somebody email me and say, "Hey, I'm curious to know how much it costs to be a member of your group?"

Matt Landau What did you say? ​

Dana Lubner I said, we don't have member do set up. ​

Dana Lubner Dana, that was your big opportunity. $250 for the year. ​

Dana Lubner I said, we're rolling out member dues as we create our content calendar ​ 2021. So we'd love that you're interested.

Matt Landau Okay. Well, the other thing that we agreed on there was that the ​ longer you wait to charge your advocacy members, the harder it gets, right?

Dana Lubner Oh, yeah. And that is that very accurate. After Episode Five, all about ​ money, we move on to Episode Six, which is about communications, titled We need to talk. And in this episode, we dive deeply into your internal communications within your hosting group. And as well as setting up cadences and structure for external communications, that gets sent out to the larger hosting community.

Matt Landau And we kind of concluded there that the better your ​ communication is with your fellow owners and managers in your community, the more you can achieve, the more sustainable you are, the more resistant or resilient you are to threats. And vice versa, if you're not communicating while you're not taking advantage of the group, and we walk through specific tools that we recommend your group can be using to communicate better, real time. feedback loops are key in really deep problem solving. After we need to talk was kind of the second side of that communications coin, which is telling your story, communicating to that outward general public, and how we as independent vacation rental professionals really are pretty inspiring. And we work hard and we do things properly. And if we're not sharing that we're doing ourselves a big disservice. And I just love this episode seven, Dana because we got to talk with your buddy Alex Lawson, who basically, emblazoned in my mind, the idea that if you're not writing the story, the way things should go. You don't get to predict you don't get to write the future. As groups we need to be articulating outwards what we want the future to look like in order to achieve it. That was a great one.

Dana Lubner I loved that episode. Obviously because The personal relationship there. ​ But Alex is such a straight shooter. And he was dropping knowledge bombs left and right. And I just was feeling so empowered as I was planning my second annual Good Neighbor summit, doing that episode with you all. And you know, I think what's super cool about Once you've created your own story and got your story out there, the ability to share it with government officials and use that as an educational tool, where they may otherwise have this, you know, perception of Airbnb ease from the headlines of the news, which is what we all know is a far inaccurate, oftentimes representation of the larger hosting community. And so it is powerful to have your story written, and be able to share and create your own headlines.

Matt Landau And he was actionable, too. I mean, he, he walks us through ​ literally how to pitch a journalist on an ongoing basis, I found myself taking a lot of notes in that one.

Dana Lubner Likewise, after we talked about telling your own story, and how to ​ communicate and leverage the media, we moved on to episode eight. And again, it couldn't be the sequencing sequencing of these episodes could not have been more directly correlating to my living life, it was just, I kept smiling, like pinching myself, all of those types of things. The next episode was titled, when it all goes wrong, episode eight. And I'm literally sitting with this right now, this very second, as I speak these words, and I'm living, the possibility of something that I've been working on possibly not going the way I want it too. And keeping that in mind, that it may not be the outcome that you're hoping and that oftentimes where you're striving towards the finish line, it might just be the start of the race and knowing that things are going to go wrong, and preparing yourself and your Leadership Committee, for that possibility, create so much more stamina and morale with your group. So having that be part of the conversation from day one, couldn't be more important.

Matt Landau Yeah, we didn't interview anybody, in terms of advocacy leaders ​ who didn't have at least one thing go really wrong. So for me, that episode was a bit of a support, like emotional support, when you do have that road bump when you are knocked down. And my favorite action item from that was super producer Stuart Hooper's idea of this new kind of compromise. And we're going to be talking about this a little bit later. But recognizing that when something does go wrong, it's usually not as bad as it seems, in the end, and it usually just means that you need to come to some kind of compromise with other real stakeholders in your community. That gave way to our last episode, episode nine big ideas, which was personally my favorite. And this was all about the ideas, the projects, the campaigns, the game changers, that we have come across in our interviews that have moved the needle for advocacy in any given destination. And the idea here is that we shared a number of really amazing ones. But we also share how the listeners can go about implementing their own big ideas in their own destinations. And it was really about thinking creatively and thinking outside the box and not just going with the flow, the way that things have always been done, proactively coming up with better ideas that can form that compromise with people who maybe didn't like the things that existed on the books. So that was another very timely one for you, right?

Dana Lubner I mean, it's, again, I'm pinching myself smiling ear to ear, it's what I'm ​ living right now is my own big idea. And it ties in so nicely that once you understand how to communicate with the media, the value of building relationships, knowing that it's likely has the chance of possibly going wrong, to then come up with a big idea that you can drop into all of the past episodes and what we taught you.

Matt Landau And that kind of brings us to today. But for me this roadmap, these ​ first nine steps are the single best asset in the educational department, for advocacy in our industry. Like if I ever meet somebody buddy who has a question about how to do advocacy? Well, from now on, I am telling them to listen to this entire series, they will be exponentially more equipped after listening to it than they were at the beginning. And it's not perfect by any means. And we glossed over some of the things that we needed to. But I do think it is the single best roadmap that exists for independent owners and managers on their own. And together as a group to follow to see that there is something that works, there is a process here that you can trust it.

Dana Lubner And that's exactly why we decided to bring so many voices to the ​ conversation. Neither you nor I ever got together and said, hey, let's do this. Because we have all the answers. We knew by asking questions that I was personally curious about myself, and that we knew needed to be shared with the larger community, that we would be able to kind of gather the wisdom of all of the people out there that have been throwing spaghetti, it's been a big motto of this year for me in many areas of my life. And based off of what stuck for them, we figured we would bring it here and share it with everyone that maybe needs a little nudge or an example for inspiration.

Matt Landau And if you're listening to this, and you agree with anything that we ​ just said, our single most appreciative favor is you sharing this podcast series with your vacation rental community. So the single thing that you all can do is go to your local Facebook group, your virtual forum, your newsletter, your community leader, maybe it's some kind of bulletin board, maybe you just stepping out onto your balcony, you know, shouting it into the streets. Listen to how to save your vacation rental business, it is a primer on how to do sustainable vacation rental advocacy.

Dana Lubner And now a word from our sponsor. Track Hospitality Software powered ​ by Travel Net Solutions transforms your vacation rental company, so you can transform the way vacation rental advocacy plays out in your region. Track provides software solutions to decrease your technology footprint to save you time, money, and resources. In fact, track was recognized by VRMB's Keystone awards as the software of the future. And by aligning with a podcast like this one, the goal is for track partners to then devote that newly freed up time, profits and resources towards banding together against even bigger challenges, like unfair vacation rental regulations.

Matt Landau So this brings us to Episode 10. Dana, where do we go from here? ​ And we gave ourselves a little challenge over the last week, would you mind sharing it with the listeners?

Dana Lubner You gave Stu and myself as well as you challenged to think about what ​ would be a massive takeaway that we haven't already shared over the season that we've learned, and that we can share with the listeners.

Matt Landau And there's something very powerful that comes with sitting down. ​ And hearing every word that comes out of the mouth of every one of these advocacy leaders, we start to notice sort of patterns beneath the surface and themes that are surfacing over and over again. And super producer Stuart Hooper, are you still there?

Superproducer Stuart Hooper (Mangofish Studios) I am here. I am actually ​ always here.

Matt Landau And when you are presented with this challenge, did you have ​ your lesson or takeaway right away? Or did you have to think about it a little bit?

Superproducer Stuart Hooper (Mangofish Studios) I had to think about how ​ to expand upon it and how to articulate it. But there has really been one thing kind of running through my head all season, the more the more in this material I listen to.

Matt Landau And this is I would love for you to share yours first. But this is for ​ those who don't know, Stuart, a really unique perspective for us because Stu has that unbiased view from outside he is not well was not up until very recently. You're now a vacation rental host, ironically. But you have what I thought was a really valuable, unbiased third party perspective on the dynamics of this and when Dana and I got too emotional about certain things you often bring us down to earth and speak. pragmatically Would you mind sharing your big lesson first?

Superproducer Stuart Hooper (Mangofish Studios) My big lesson my super ​ takeaway, so to speak out of everything we've heard this season is compromise. Now, we dove into this in episode eight when it all goes I even spoke to it a little bit. But I think it's really important to look at it. It's not just compromise with regulatory agencies or compromise with anti groups, or even just compromise with competitors. It's all of that. And it's more, you know, vacation rentals are actually a very old business. There's, there's 100 year-old lodges that have been around. And there's kind of a universal feeling and hospitality that goes with all of that. But in the last 10 years, certainly at the beginning of the 2010s, and the rise of Airbnb, and all of this, you have this kind of hustling, vacation rental startup, rent out my couch, and my friends couches and get 100 apartments in New York, flying under the radar and create an empire, that sort of vacation rental narrative.

Superproducer Stuart Hooper (Mangofish Studios) I think that's going away, ​ I think the whole, you know, move fast and break things in Silicon Valley that people are questioning now anyways, especially when applied to the vacation rental business is going away. So I don't know if connecting compromise to the original spirit of hospitality is a little too much of a stretch. But for me, every day of this business moving forward, is going to be some kind of a compromise. Now in the destinations you were in, especially in the United States, from a regulatory standpoint, and from a lot of these other elements that we've discussed in the show, you have to figure out why you love this business, and why you want to be in it beyond just some kind of quick buck, quick, hustles sort of thing. And then you have to take that knowledge and that love for it and realize that you're gonna have to talk to your competitors, you're gonna have to talk to anti groups, you're gonna have to get good at telling your narrative and figuring out why you love doing this, and why it's good for your community, you have to be a part of your community, you're gonna have to give back to your community.

Superproducer Stuart Hooper (Mangofish Studios) And you're really gonna ​ have to work with succession of local governments to make sure your business stays alive. And if you do all of the things we've talked about in this podcast, and you're prepared for things to go wrong, you've got a good shot and having a long lasting, lucrative and fulfilling vacation rental business. But there's no more. take no prisoners craziness, it is sort of a life of compromise at some level on a daily basis, which again, I think is a great thing for people who are naturally hosts to be able to do because to some level hosting is compromised. But anyways, that's my super takeaway.

Matt Landau Well, I don't know about you, Dana. But I'm just very disappointed ​ Stuart hasn't grasped the subject matter from the season, because that was just a shortcut. I love that one. And for me, it's it does signify this new chapter, the end of the wild, wild west short term rental sphere, it's got to be more grounded, more balanced, more compromised, more fair. And a lot of times, that means adjusting your expectations, like what you could have done 10 years ago, maybe it's not so realistic anymore, and making sure that you're doing things properly. is I think the name of the game.

Superproducer Stuart Hooper (Mangofish Studios) Matt, if I may just throw ​ one more thing in there. I I think you're right. But you know, it's funny with the wild, wild west thing, this is still young industry in its new form, there's still a lot of room for innovation, and a lot of room to try things and a lot of room to get things wrong. It's just, I don't think there's a lot more room for innovation in terms of like doing things illegally or flying under the radar. That's, that's so if you do want to, you know, have a young space you can innovate in there's still room to grow here. It's just not in those areas.

Matt Landau Yeah, that's true. It's all relative. Like we say it's the end of one ​ chapter. But people who are just entering now for the first time, we're like, this is an amazing, new innovative space. Dana, any thoughts on Stu's lesson?

Dana Lubner I think it's taught me a lot and caused me to sort of reframe my own ​ definition of what a win would look like. So I couldn't agree more with this idea for the sustainability and future of everything we've been talking about this season.

Dana Lubner So Matt, when thinking about your big takeaway from this season, what ​ came to mind for you?

Matt Landau A lot of things came to mind for me, and I wrote them all down. ​ And in the end, my big lesson, super takeaway is actually very simple. And I just want people to know that I did think about it a lot. But my big lesson is to be a good neighbor. And I'd like to cue the neighborhood, sentimental music in the background, long term advocacy in our industry, for me, when it really all boils down starts with each host, each owner manager it starts Their home, whether they live in the destination or the property itself. Being a good neighbor starts with single gestures to others on your block or in town. It starts like literally stepping outside your front door and introducing yourself to the people next door, helping neighbors fix things that may affect you or your family or your livelihood. Like in an actual neighborhood that's a pothole or a fence that needs mending. But stepping up and fixing those things, even if you don't know how, like inventing your own little way, your own little harebrained solution on how to fix something, and some of them will work. And some of them won't work.

Matt Landau But being a good neighbor means trying. And it means supporting ​ community leaders like Dana, in Denver, who are fighting for what you want. If you're a stakeholder of that destination. What does it mean? It means showing up at their meetings, like Dana, we got your meeting on Tuesday on zoom, I'm going to be there. It means donating to the efforts of these groups that are standing up for what you want. Being a good, a good neighbor means listening better. It means respecting people more simply saying hello, when you're passing somebody in the street calling to check in if you live somewhere else. Being a good neighbor means chipping in wherever you can for me, and making sure that everybody is carrying their weight in a community. We're all sharing these common spaces with people who agree and disagree. But being a good neighbor, for me means leaving that place better than we found it. And it's hard to achieve across every interview that we've done this season. Frankly, in any case study that I have seen on regulation, it's hard to achieve anything great or lasting in this regulatory field, if you're not filling this very, very fundamental role of being a good neighbor. And until you the listener starts this process of being a good neighbor, or maybe if you're already a good neighbor, and even better neighbor, until you start doing this in your destination, you can expect your neighborhood to reflect the effort back on you, for better or worse. What do you guys think?

Dana Lubner I love that I mean, that hits 100% home, and it's on par with everything ​ I've discovered over the last couple years of my own advocacy efforts. And I think especially the year that we've all had, it makes you look in a smaller radius, I think because we've all been tied to our homes in a way that I've never experienced. And it kind of makes you take inventory of what your community is, and how you want to add and be a contributor to the vibrancy or the lack of vibrancy or the energy of your surroundings. And so I love that, you know, having a mask on you can't smile to people. And so the best way you might be able to smile is to say hello. And that is massively powerful, Matt.

Superproducer Stuart Hooper (Mangofish Studios) Yeah, man, I think it was ​ fantastic. I think that, you know, it's a bit cliche to say, you know, if you want to change the world, start by changing yourself that within this industry, it really is true. If we all were good neighbors, we would probably have less of an image problem with the real neighbors and all the communities that that vacation rentals are in. And I think obviously, part of events like Dana's Good Neighbor summit are taking that kind of Okay, first, we're going to be good neighbors. And second, we're going to tell the story of how we're actually good neighbors, which some people might not know. And spreading that and spreading the word and spreading this bigger narrative of vacation rentals, the ones we know the professionally operated vacation rental businesses with high standards. They give back to their communities. We highlight them as good neighbors. You know, that's the only kind of narrative weapon we have against the you know, Airbnb party houses, a narrative that the media loves to talk about all the time.

Matt Landau 100% Well shout out to Mr. Rogers for the inspiration on this one. ​ And what is it AllState? Good Neighbor, State Farm. There you go State Farm. Shout out to both of them. Dana You have now I think consumed more advocacy anecdotes than 99.9% of vacation rental professionals. So I'm especially excited to hear your super takeaway.

Dana Lubner This is a fun exercise for me. So my super takeaway is inspired by ​ something that I found myself going through numerous times this year. And I'd say honestly, it started when I started my journey last year, and it's inspired by the no fear stickers from back in the day, hello to my, my 90s kids out there. But you know, when the idea of doing something you've never done before, it takes a lot of courage. And I think, you know, getting into advocacy with no experience and background and not really knowing, kind of feeling like you're in a room that's dark, and you're feeling around trying to find a light switch, very often throughout these last couple years. And so I think this year pushed me, and a lot of ways where no one really knows how this is all going to turn out, you know, I'm speaking specifically to the pandemic.

Dana Lubner But everybody's kind of been in this uncharted territory, place in life for ​ many of us. And it feels like, at times, we're unsure of who's flying this plane that we're on. And so this big takeaway of being courageous, and no fear has been what's been my guiding star, my light post, throughout all of the decisions I've made. And you know, I think something that I've really embraced over the last two years of my own advocacy journey, is that something I initially want to say no to? Maybe in the past, I would have just said no, like, I don't I know, I'm not feeling it. I don't want to take the challenge on Do I have time in my life for x? And then this year, it's been something where I'll say, Okay, wait, before you say no, before you turn down an opportunity, do that gut check. And if you have a little voice from your gut that says that maybe there's a reason you should say yes, then lean into it. So I'm trying to lean into the things that I would maybe feel fearful about saying yes to, and taking that courageous leap of faith, knowing that I can rely on people in the community that I reach out to, to be supportive to me on this path. And so it's taught me a lot like there's been numerous examples, whether it's, like we said in last episode, reaching out to a former mayor to pick his brain, like I did yesterday on the phone and ask him what lessons I can take from his own personal experience or reaching out to anti groups and saying...

Dana Lubner "Hey, can we meet in the park and talk over pastries?" And, you know, ​ can I have that courage to know I might get yelled at, or being open minded and courageous to change your stance on the topic? You know, it's very easy to dig your heels in and say, you know, as soon as you make your battle cry, it's hard to sometimes change directions. And I think it's so important to be brave, and say, Hey, you know what, I've actually changed my perspective. So there are numerous opportunities, whether it's volunteering to sit on a committee, or be a part of an organization, where you find that there's an opportunity to build bridges, and build up that community rooted advocacy base that you can, you know, lead the charge with. So being brave and taking leaps of faith. You know, it's been a massive takeaway for me this season.

Superproducer Stuart Hooper (Mangofish Studios) I think that sense of no ​ fear is what's really needed to find the way forward in this regulatory landscape. There's always going to be an element of threat to our vacation rental

businesses, and we can't let that drive us at the same time. We need to be open to new ideas. We need to be open to trying things we wouldn't normally and we need to be able to reach across aisles, reach out to competitors just do a lot of things that would seem wouldn't seem right for us under normal circumstances. So I really think that's a fantastic takeaway.

Matt Landau I do too. And I oftentimes ask people who have achieved amazing ​ things in life, like what were the leaps in their career that they took like, typically it's not a slow and steady, gradual growth, but there are typical Like jumps in which you went to a next level. And I asked him like, how they navigated those leaps, it was almost always like exactly what you just said, of being courageous, asking, How can I do something that will truly change? How can I create something that will last something that's never been done before, something that will give me purpose, and like putting it out there, and just going after it, what's the worst worst thing that could happen, you don't achieve it, that's like, not that bad of a cost.

Dana Lubner I'm learning to get comfortable with that discomfort and that feeling of, ​ you know, slight butterflies, slight nauseum. And get, like kind of reframing that as like a good feeling. It's like that giddy. You know, goosebumps sort of feeling.

Matt Landau Giddy nausea, I think we should call it. ​

Dana Lubner At the end of each of our interviews this season, we asked our guests to ​ share the one thing they wanted all vacation rental professionals to here. Now, mind you, these are some of the most qualified individuals in the world to be discussing this topic. And we saved these soundbites for the last moments of the last episode of the season, we're going to share some of these thoughts with you here.

Phil Minardi (Expedia) You only win a campaign by convincing citizens to vote ​ for something as opposed to voting against something. And I think that's apt for our industry in particular, because we have so much for communities to vote for, and so much for elected officials to support. But just like any campaign, there is a lot of noise out there. And we have to be willing, as an industry, to communicate our value, to engage with our communities in a way that we get folks to vote for

us. And to get our community to vote for fair policies, you have to do that in a way that touches the community in a multitude of channels. It's not just going and meeting with your elected official or calling them, it's not just writing a letter to the editor, and calling it done. It's not just hosting a local Alliance meeting, we really need to be looking at how we engage on the policy front in a more systematic way, just as we have go to market strategies for new properties that we're bringing online, just as we have strategies to bring on a new otaa. Or just as we have strategies to get as many folks in our vacation rentals for a particular holiday for the summer season. We need to have a systemic strategy and campaign if we are going to win on the policy front.

Matt Landau That was filming Nardi, who I think represents one of the most ​ responsible online travel agencies in Expedia. And I say responsible because they're trying to do things the right way. And Phil was a fantastic asset for us this season. I think we use his sound bites as often as any other guest. He has such a great perspective from across the country on what's working and what's not. But he really truly is a champion of the independent owner, and manager. And I tend to really take his feedback and his advice to heart.

Dana Lubner Megan McCrea, from NASTRA has been hugely impactful in my own ​ journey. And I know in many others, everything he teaches us this season can be replicated in many of the destinations across the country.

Megan McCrea (NASTRA) One thing that I think that has been hugely helpful is ​ we had to go beyond just being advocacy. I mean, people hear that and they run and I don't think it's because they don't care. It's just people are exhausted of the political climate related to anything right now. So they hear one more thing that even halfway sounds political, and they're like, I'm out right. So doing things like we brought in Justin Ford from Breezeway who did safety, we brought in proper insurance and talk about insurance. And we've done hosting panels where we talk about hosting best practices and things that have nothing to do with being legal or political or advocating. It's just learning and being able to elevate our host community, because obviously, that's better for the community anyway, not just the host community, but the community around us, if we have smart, responsible hosts, what we always try to do is have a little bit of education. And so 80% of the meeting is eating, drinking, talking, networking, and then the rest is either education or updates. This way, we have a way to have them engaged in the

group and be a part of the group. And then they're going to get those political updates. But that's not the only thing they're getting from us.

Matt Landau Jessica Black of Moms Against Short Term Rentals, has been my ​ MVP of the season. When I first reached out and asked if she'd be willing to participate in our project, I was really nervous, because I assumed that I was just going to get the same treatment, that all short term rentals get in the eyes of these anti groups, which is stop ruining neighborhoods. And what I found very quickly is that Jessica is a neighbor first and a mother first, and a resident a community member first and that her arguments were sensible, and that her family themselves use vacation rentals. For me, she was a really special counter perspective, to add in the seasons talks.

Jessica Black (Moms Against Short Term Rentals) I hear a lot of arguments ​ that "Oh, you can just rely on existing nuisance ordinances" or noise ordinances. Whenever I hear those, I think that's probably somebody that hasn't had to call the police late on a Friday or Saturday night in a really long time. Because you know, those calls get triage a noise complaint, or nuisance complaint is not a high priority call, you can wait hours for somebody to come out by the time they come out. The issue might not be going on anymore. So if there's nothing for the police or code compliance to see and compliance isn't even typically work on weekends, when the issues are happening, it's hard to get any relief that way. I think you have to work with the community to be sustainable because you can't just commodify an entire community and have that work long term there has to it has to work for the people that live there.

Dana Lubner Claire Reisweig from GARM embodies what our industry needs, she was ​ so generous, but the wisdom that she shared with us that I know it's set me on my path in a whole new direction.

Claire Reisweig (GARM) Vacation rentals are amazing. Vacation rentals are an ​ amazing form of lodging for families and for groups. And my hope is that property managers and individual homeowners become such an integrated part of their communities that they are not seen as the opposition to hotels or that they are the antithesis to a strong neighborhood. But they're seen as micro businesses that are helping build the fabric of the community. So many of us exist in either traditional or in tourist related areas. And I think there's so much potential, it breaks my heart. It's distressing when I see that, that relationships have deteriorated between the community and the vacation rental community. Some of the times though, I have to say Dana and this might just be my tangent is is that it's the fault of the vacation rental community. They see their only job is to rent, they don't care who they rent to, they are going to send a key code. They don't care if it's over occupancy or if a party or the burden it puts on the neighborhood. Those are not the people that we haven't garm they're not the people for the most part that we have in Galveston. We've run a lot of those out. My hope is is that community see the value of vacation rentals and that vacation rental owners, individuals and property management companies step up to the plate.

Matt Landau Page Teel, who's the president of the Northeast Vacation Rental ​ Professionals for me is like that. quintessential, unexpected hero of this story. And there's a lot of pages out there. But she was not trained to do this by any means and sort of rose to this position overnight and is all of a sudden, courageously leading all these vacation rental professionals in the northeast, towards fair regulations just absolutely brilliant.

Paige Teel (NEVRP) The downside of flying under the radar, as a vacation ​ rental company, or as you know, in Vacation Rentals is you don't get the recognition you need. When you need it. You don't have folks calling you don't have folks thinking about you, you don't have legislation wondering, you know, how our vacation rental companies doing. That's definitely the downside of flying under the radar in this industry.

Matt Landau Eric Bay of the Alliance for Neighborhood Prosperity in New ​ Orleans, I like to think of Eric as Sisyphus of vacation rentals. He's the one courageously pushing that rock up the hill for what seems like eternity, but he's doing it with a smile. And he's doing it as a community member the way that he has woven in local small businesses into Neighborhood Development, I think stands alone as one of the most heroic storylines that we've got right now.

Eric Bay (ANP) Having the ANP here in New Orleans has driven a brand in this ​ city. Brand new vacation rental managers and property owners. Oh, they're ANP members. Okay, they're not a one off. Oh, they're not a newbie. Oh, you guys,

oh, your ANP members. So it gave some credit, some street credit, some credibility. Everybody here in the city, who either has a individual property or wants to list one or create one to get a license. They know our group, so they reach out to us. I've made sure that when someone was reaching out, email cell, mostly email, looking for help and support, I did not throw my name out as offering to say, Hey, I'll manage your property. What I did is I helped grow the businesses of six to seven or eight property managers who started out with two or three and now have 10, 15, 20. And I grew their businesses by sending people to them. My name then got two owners, my name got two other property managers who were leaving the city or leaving the industry.

Dana Lubner Dave Krauss from rent responsibly is someone who is always there ​ when it comes to the advocacy conversation. I think he embodies the cheerleader of the industry.

David Krauss (Rent Responsibly) In preparing for this podcast, I really ​ thought, why do I care about this stuff. I grew up in a house where both my parents cared incredibly deeply about things that they ostensibly had no direct involvement in, but they just discovered it and said, this needs to be solved, or this needs to be studied, or this needs to be improved. And my mom is quite ill right now. And I talk to her often about what we're doing it responsibly. And she's very proud of me. But I just want to tell you a quick story about my mom and my dad. My mom is the John Stein, Professor of Disability Research at the Heller School at Brandeis University. And what does that mean? It means that she decided in grad school in her 20s to pursue something she just was exposed to once and that is that folks with mental retardation were being deinstitutionalized but nobody was studying the needs that they had, or the needs that their family had, because they needed full time caretakers.

David Krauss (Rent Responsibly) And so I grew up in a house where my mom ​ cared so deeply about basically defenseless people and their families that I just I didn't realize until as preparing for this podcast, in some ways, my parents were instilling in me the fact that when things need to be done, and you see them it is your obligation to do them, or at least, you should do them. And they set great examples of how to do that. And my mom ended up at a very successful career at Brandeis, she ended up the provost and she was incredibly capable, and she's amazing and beautiful and all these things. And I hope she hears this because

I've really realized, holy shit, I was inspired from the day I was born to effectively find something like this. And that's just I didn't know it until either preparing something that I appreciate, Dana, you and Matt for letting me even think about this because, you know, you do need to find motivation. But I grew up in a house full of motivation. I just didn't realize it until, until I was preparing for this, but this is, you know, this is real. This goes, you know, and I'm not gonna stop, they didn't stop, I'm not gonna stop, we got to solve these things.

Dana Lubner If this series about leadership and responsibility has resonated with you, ​ consider joining me and becoming a supporter of VRMB communities. You can pay whatever you'd like and collaborate with the most creative vacation rental pros around the world. Head over to vrmb.com to learn more. Before we go, I have to give a shout out to Matt Landau for giving me the opportunity to do this podcast, it has been a dream come true. I've been a huge fan of podcasts for the last 10 years or so. So having an opportunity to create an educational series on advocacy has not only been incredibly exciting, but also massively nerve wracking. When I got started on all of this, I wasn't sure I could do it. I was 50 shades of imposter syndrome. And if I'm honest, I still experience nervousness and doubt, as I navigate uncharted territory. But I want to thank all of you for listening, your kind words, your support, and encouragement, this podcast would not have been possible without the creative genius of super producers do of mango fish studios. You truly made this vision become a reality. And I've been blown away working with you. And thank you to track software for your belief and the need for advocacy, education, and to all of our guests for sharing your wisdom with us. And of course, a shout out to my husband, Andy lipner. for believing in me and being my inspiration for no fear in life. I cannot wait to see what the future holds. Thank you so, so much. Subscribe to our podcast channel to learn about our next big mission. And please share the show with your colleagues and allies. We thought that it only be a 10 part series, but it's become clear. We're only getting started.

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