How to Scale a Short-Term Rental Management Business Without Sacrificing Quality

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 we've got two returning guests. We have Joe and Max Bachmeier. They come back as winners of the new award, the New Year Awards, and we have a new award. They were our 2025 AirDNA Best Property Managers last year, the number one rated property manager in the country. This year, they come back still in the top five, but their new award was fastest growing.

So 12 months later, they've gone from roughly 120 listings to 260 listings, and they are still in the top five in the nation on guest rating. So essentially, they've doubled the company, and we're still able to maintain their top tier rating. So I am so excited to figure out how they did it. Joe and Max, welcome back.

Joe Bachmeier (1:17)

Thanks for having us, Jamie. We're excited to be here.

Max and I were talking. I didn't think we'd make this podcast again this year, but here we are. We're standing and we're so proud to be here.

Jamie Lane (1:28)

So maybe just let's start with the growth. Roughly doubling like that is crazy.

Can you tell us a bit about where that growth came from? Was it organic? And you guys talked about how you weren't going to open up new markets. Did you expand to new markets? I also loved last year, you talked about the sort of sending a dollar bill in the mail. Like any new techniques you guys sort of garnered to sort of drive this growth?

Joe Bachmeier (2:01)

It's just been consistency with many things in life. If you're if you're consistent and you're doing it every day, it pays off. So there hasn't been any any crazy secrets to the dollar mailer. We didn't do another one of those, but we we still get calls on it. Anyone that didn't last the last time, we mailed a dollar to every owner in our market as their first owner payout and we're still getting calls from that mailer, which is cool. We have been consistent with mailers.

We started a referral program, reaching out to realtors and our owners and nodes in the market and offering incentives on that. We wrapped a couple of our vehicles. So it's not one specific thing, it's consistency, it's hitting them a bunch of different ways, and it's having our reputation proceed us with obviously our AirDNA ranking.

Max Bachmeier (2:51)

Yeah, and then I'll add to that AirDNA ranking, the accolades that you gave us last year. We've screamed it from the mountaintops. I mean, that I think has carried a lot of weight with some people that do know the industry and our operators.

For lack of better words, we call ourselves professional hosts, but there are also hosts out there that own a lot of different properties and want the best property managers in their region. We've gotten phone calls from all different markets. You've touched on it, Jamie, we have had to push away markets because we want to maintain that high quality. No matter how many properties we have, we have this mentality that we are always this small family business. That's the operation we want to run and that's the operation we want to continue to run and continue to make sure that our guests feel it, our owners feel it, and that our team feels that as well.

Jamie Lane (3:42)

So, Max, that was one of your sort of lessons of advice for people was, I'm coming out of last year's episode, was stay local, don't spread yourself too thin, keep it in your backyard. So, how local have you guys kept it? Because I'm sure you're now getting asked in an expanded area, like, is it still just in Fredericksburg, or have you guys expanded a bit beyond that?

Max Bachmeier (4:09)

Yeah, we manage about 90, I would say 90, I haven't done math on it, but I would say about 98% Fredericksburg. The second largest market we operate in is Austin, and then a few markets sprinkled in there that actually we've, we're involved in those markets because we've been involved since day one. We are a lot more friendly taking on properties and markets that were a little bit further from us.

If it was essentially doing an owner a favor, right? Maybe an owner already has a property that we manage in Fredericksburg. They say, hey, would you manage this property out in Kingsland for us? And you know, of course, with some of those, you know, incredible owners, we, it's hard to say no to. However, we've been able to pretty much consolidate it to Fredericksburg and Austin for the most part and consolidate, you know, continue to consolidate and operate and putting more focus into growing within Fredericksburg and Austin, which may be one of the most profound pieces of that information, right? Because you talk about all this growth, but you're like, all right, well, how many other markets have you entered? The answer is virtually not. Fredericksburg and Austin is our bread and butter. And that's, you know, that's kind of, that's our backyard.