170 Properties, 2 People: The AI-Powered Property Manager

**Jamie Lane** (0:05)
Welcome to the STR Data Lab.
Hello, and welcome to the STR Data Lab. I'm Jamie Lane, Chief Economist at AirDNA, and I'm joined here today by a really interesting guest. We have Bill Ulammandakh. He is the co-founder and CEO of ProHost AI. Bill, welcome to the show.

**Bill Ulammandakh** (0:28)
Thanks for having me, Jamie. Great to be here.

**Jamie Lane** (0:30)
Yeah, so we met at Verma, I think, last year in Vegas.
You guys had a booth there. I had seen and demoed ProHost AI, and it seemed like an incredible product back then, and I see you guys have made a lot in recent releases, so I'm excited to dig into that later on, but maybe just wanted to start, and you maybe followed a different path than I think a lot of founders that I've talked with, but it did sort of weave in and out of property management, but maybe you could maybe start with, how did you get into the short-term rental industry, and what brought you there?

**Bill Ulammandakh** (1:26)
Yeah, so before ProHost, I actually used to work at Airbnb as a data scientist on the hosting team. And at Airbnb, I was working on building tools for hosts actually, like optimizing the onboarding flow. And one of the projects I worked on was automatically ranking photos for hosts with AI. And a lot of hosts may have seen that feature, and then also optimizing the search ranking algorithm at Airbnb based on like additional signals from the ad on hosts and external datasets, etc. So I was at Airbnb for six years. So I was very deep into like the tech space for hosts for a long time. And I've always been really interested in real estate, rentals, and like investing in real estate. So while I was at Airbnb, I started investing in short-term rentals myself. So it was like during COVID, started buying properties and then grow it to 15 properties during STRs in different states. And that worked out really well, but really felt the operational challenges of scaling this portfolio.
And then especially for a really distributed portfolio with pretty complex properties, like there are like seven bedroom or five bedroom large properties. There was just a lot of operational overhead of coordinating the maintenance, coordinating the cleaners, and then obviously the guest messaging.
So I felt like this is like really challenging to scale operationally. But also at the same time, I felt like if you really had great software to do all of these manual tasks that I was doing as a property manager, it could be so much easier. So I always had like a bug in my mind that I could build something here that could be really cool for hosts. And then when AI came around, like ChatGBT and like all these early LLM products, I felt like, well, like this is, you could totally automate everything that I'm doing as a property manager. And then finally decided to found my own company. So that was the origin story for ProHost. And then we went through my Combinator, raised funding from investors.
And then obviously there have been other products in the space, like focused on AI messaging, guest-facing automations. And our vision has been from the beginning, like more broad, that like we want to do the messaging portion, but we also want to automate the operational piece. So we have really invested in having great mobile apps, having like really end-to-end AI workspace for people that handles the messaging, but also handles the cleanings, handles the tasks, and has like end-to-end operations. So, yeah, that was the vision, and we've been able to build out the product like we wanted, and now we're seeing really fast growth among our customers. So yeah, that's how I got into the space.

**Jamie Lane** (4:28)
Yeah. So a couple of questions on maybe for your first years and then want to get into specifically around ProHost, but like now you've been an Airbnb host, a property manager yourself, and obviously talking with a lot of property managers and hosts through onboarding and working with your own customers. So is there any like one or two things you've learned like that you learned at Airbnb that you don't think people like understand about how the platform actually works?
If that makes sense?

**Bill Ulammandakh** (5:10)
I think, well, for more general public, the assumption is often that Airbnb hosts are like small time, less professional hosts. But the reality is most of the full-time short-term mentors are like being managed by professional operators. So that is like one, is understanding that people have about our space from the outside. And I think for people who are already in the space, operators in the space, yeah, like we have sort of, everybody's like really used to buying a lot of different STR point solutions for handling different pieces up to stack. And that's like really embedded. And like oftentimes, and we, it happened to us as well as operators, we ended up with like 10 different subscriptions, just for doing a lot of different things.