From Daily Admin to Scalable Operations with DenverStays and Chekin

Patrick (0:00)

Perfect. Hello, everybody. Welcome to our interview with Chekin and also our joint customer DenverStays. I'm very happy to be here as well. My name is Patrick. I'm the partnership manager of Hospitable. Just giving over the word to Valerie to quickly introduce yourself and then also to Manuel as well.

Valerie (0:19)

Thank you. Hi, Manuel. Hi, Patrick. Thanks for the time today, Valerie, and I lead the partnership at Chekin.

And yeah, I'm here today because DenverStays are great shared customer of Hospitable and Chekin. And Manuel has a really interesting story to tell us today. So I'm just excited to hear about it.

Patrick (0:43)

Perfect. Then let's kick it off. Manuel, tell us a little bit more about yourself and also about DenverStays and how you get started into the short-term rental. Sure.

Manuel (0:52)

So my name is Manuel, and DenverStays is actually the brand that I chose for the short-term rental properties that I debuted in Denver, Colorado, which started out with just one property as a bit of a house hack because I was deployed to Italy with a military, with on a deployment that I thought was temporary, ended up being about five and a half years long. But during that time, I wanted to list my house on Airbnb, and then I saw the opportunities that that presented, and that quickly expanded to three additional properties in Denver, which were, and I took over management myself with the help of Hospitable.

And then other hosts were in the area, saw the reviews that I got, and the quality that I was able to offer, and they asked me to help them out. I didn't actually expect to become a short-term rental manager, but that's how it ended up. And then I was able to expand that to Europe as well with Chekin's help, because of the additional regulatory requirements that would have been a little bit difficult to manage on my own. So now I have two properties of my own in Europe, and about five or six that I help others manage and I'm working on onboarding with Hospitable and Chekin.

Patrick (2:20)

Super interesting, absolutely.

So you manage more or less like 12 to 15 properties across the US, Italy, and you're right now in lovely Barcelona in Spain. Why living in Italy? What is absolutely fantastic, and also this flexibility of Chekin and Hospitable is very cool to see. How do you split those four locations, and how did that setup come about as well?

Manuel (2:45)

So it came about as my necessity, as I mentioned, because of my deployment to Italy. And then I originally had a on-the-ground property manager that took care of almost everything for my one property that I started with in Denver. But I was very involved in having that for customization, and eventually, after about a year, I asked if I could just go out of my own. And we had been using Hospitable already, and Sushu recommended to me, tried out some other ones. Turns out, I should have stuck with Hospitable, and I did, particularly because of the level of customer service that they provided as I was onboarding myself.

And then, I was able to build a team primarily from some of the cleaners that I had been working with. Some of the more proactive cleaners that were more willing to do maintenance and keep track of guests and do guest messaging.

And also, in combination with some friends that I had in the area, we were able to build a team to do local management in Denver. And my spouse also would go there and visit and maintain the properties as well. And then, once we had that baseline, we found that it was relatively easy to expand. So, there's a little bit of time zone overlap, but we have our roles pretty well defined, and it allows us to toggle between multiple locations. And then, even help out some friends with properties. I've had one in Texas, that one eventually got sold. And I have one in Los Angeles, which I just help the automations for. I just have kind of like a package that I have for one friend, where I set up the automations in Hospitable.

But then, he does a lot of the on the ground management activities. So, it's a custom set up based on the location of each property.

Patrick (4:54)

And that's super interesting. And Manuel, tell us a little bit more about how your day to day looked like before automating as well. I mean, we just talked about that you had your first matcha coffee as well. So, I think now it's everything a little bit more relaxed as well. But what was taking most of your time as well?