How AI Helps Rental Managers Find, Pitch and Keep More Owners

Thibault Masson (0:00)

Hey, hi, hello, everyone. Welcome to this new Rental Scale-Up episode.

Very happy to be here with you today. We'll be talking about attracting home owners, but specifically, specifically, we'll be talking about how AI has changed the way you can do this.

In a way, I think it's something like a saying like, no, you have to change everything for everything to stay the same. Very famous quote from the Leopard, the book and the movie, and because it's a brand new approach, we say to go to the usual suspect to be talking about the topic and you see this, it's Brooke, I see Brooke Pfautz from Vintory. We'll be talking with him because, interesting enough, just like many of us right now working in our vacation rental industry, we are more or less rethinking how we do things, right? And we are very curious to hear his approach. Welcome to RSU by PriceLabs weekly podcast. Subscribe now. How AI can help property managers acquire and retain more owners in 2026 and 2027, I want to say. I'm Thibault, I'm the founder of Rental Scale-Up, now RSU by PriceLabs. And I also am the head of product marketing for PriceLabs. I talk about Brooke, but why don't I let Brooke introduce himself? Brooke, how are you?

Brooke Pfautz (1:32)

I'm doing great. Thibault, thanks for having me on here. Yeah, really excited. I've been in the short-term rental industry. Actually, October 1st will be my 19th anniversary. So I started a company just like everybody else. I kind of stumbled into it. I was actually a mortgage banking prior to short-term rentals, but started a company called Vantage Resort Realty in Ocean City, Maryland, which is about three hours east of Washington, DC, and grew that company pretty fast. Grew up from zero to 500 properties in five years. I sold that business in 2013

Then I went down to Orlando. I was chief business development officer and the largest property managers down there. Did that for five years, helped them grow to over 500 properties. Then seven and a half years ago, launched Vintory. If you're not familiar with Vintory, we're a data sales and marketing platform that helps professional vacational managers grow their inventory. We only focus on inventory. We don't do anything with guests. We don't do anything with operations. We focus exclusively on that side of the house. We've helped a thousand companies scale and grow.

We've learned what to do and more importantly, what not to do and really excited to be here today and share some of the lessons that I've learned with really rebuilding our company in an AI first way.

Thibault Masson (2:46)

That's great. Thank you so much for being here. Happy anniversary. And same thing, right? So if in the chat, feel free to let us know where you were based, how many properties you are, how many properties you manage. Sorry, so we have a good idea. For Q&A, let me do housekeeping. We have a Q&A section box here. Just use that if you have questions.

And we'll try to answer them. This is being recorded. Do stay until the end. But this is being recorded and you'll get a recording obviously, right? I see Gabriel from Colombia, I see Elliot from DC. Hello everyone. All right, good to have you. Gonzalo in Miami. All right. So let me go back to the slides quickly before we start the discussion to share what we were going here.

All right. So a quick word. Obviously, Rental Scale-Up, we have, if you don't know what we do, it's in industry. Our Sugar Press Lab is an industry and news source. We, every week, we have a couple of articles where we try to cover what's happening. With Airbnb, Vrbo, Booking, the fees, for example, all these changes in fees, we all like to look to listen to what's happening and things like this. Well, that's what, for example, Rental Scale-Up covers, also market data or what's new in tech.

All right, today's agenda, three topics I talked about in the introduction. How can you leverage AI to find the owners worth signing? Who needs a property manager and who's worth it, who's worth your efforts? Number two, we'll also be talking about assets you may need to create. For example, to talk to an owner, to warm them up, to take them to a place where you can convert them online, for example. We also talked about the data you may need to show them, or to track them, or to keep them, because it's also obviously very important.

All right, so the first topic, finding the owners worth signing. I'm pretty sure I'm going to start with you, Brooke, on this, because it's obviously you talk about Vintory's mission, it's one of the key tenets of Vintory, and also, as you said, we worked, we completely refunded the way you guys did this. I'm very curious, but what did you do on this?