The Overlooked Revenue Stream for STR Hosts with Ben Levy

Ben Levy (0:00)

We've actually billed our business from day one to be partnership led.

So we do a rev share with property managers or hosts. That way, they're not paying a monthly subscription or any type of ongoing fee. We benefit when their guest book experiences, and then we will split that revenue with the host pretty much 50-50.

Avery Carl (0:33)

Hey, y'all, welcome back to another episode of The Short Term Show. I'm your host Avery Carl, and today we have the co-founder and CEO of Localbird, which is a very cool company that I've just learned about here in the last few weeks.

We have their co-founder and CEO Ben Levy here to talk about what it does and how it can help you as a short-term rental host. How's it going, Ben?

Ben Levy (0:54)

Thanks for having me, Avery. I'm great. How are you?

Avery Carl (0:57)

I'm doing awesome. Can't complain.

Ben Levy (1:00)

Cool.

Avery Carl (1:01)

Yeah. I'm excited.

Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on. So let's just dive right in. So let's start by just introducing yourself to our audience. Tell us about yourself and how you got into the short-term rental business.

Ben Levy (1:14)

Yeah. So my name is Ben. I'm 30 years old. I got into the short-term rental business initially as a guest-turned founder, where me and my family were staying on a family vacation in Hawaii.

We were looking for things to do and we couldn't find an easy way to book what we were looking for online. So we were in Hawaii. It was like the peak of COVID. We wanted to rent a surfboard and we wanted to rent a car. Now, those are two things that shouldn't be that hard to do in Hawaii, but we couldn't find a way to do that on Google. So our next logical step was to ask our host for recommendations. And we did that and he said, yeah, no problem. I can help you guys. And then handed us a dusty printed guidebook where he had basically like a list of things to do in the area with like 10 pages. A lot of it was handwritten and he said that if you need help booking anything, then I'm happy to help you or you can talk to our guest service representative and she'll help you book whatever you need.

And we realized that there's no way that it's, you know, 2022 at the time where we can easily book an Uber, we can easily book a flight, an Airbnb. But when it comes to local services and experiences, we were basically stuck with a printed guidebook.

And we basically reached out to the host and we're trying to get things going, but it didn't really work. So we decided that we were going to start the first Concierge service for vacation rentals. And that basically means us going out, finding all the local vendors and making them available and bookable for guests and giving property managers a cut of everything that their guests book. And this was for us a way to not only make the guest experience better, but also give hosts a new stream of revenue through commissions. We started off in Costa Rica where my brother was living at the time. And we reached out to a couple of hosts and boutique hotels that he knew. And they gave us a shot. They were willing to kind of, you know, put us in touch with all their guests through initially QR codes on the table. And that basically grew. Now, we're active all over Costa Rica, Mexico and the US.

And we raised over $7.4 million to date. Team-based, distributed globally. And yeah, happy to dive in.

Avery Carl (4:08)

Awesome. So you guys started in 2022 You started in Costa Rica. I want to hear about that because I feel like trying to start in another country is a lot more difficult than trying to start here in America. So I want to hear about those first few months of getting up and running abroad.

Ben Levy (4:27)

Yeah. So I actually think that the fact that we started Costa Rica was one of our biggest advantages because that is a market that the experiences market is fragmented in general. But if you go to Costa Rica, over 80 percent of the local vendors only operate in one location. They are very offline in their nature, where most of them aren't even using a reservation system for bookings. So they're using WhatsApp, phone calls, and at the same time, guests that are traveling from the US to Costa Rica are using their phones, and they're looking for an online way to book. There's a gap where a lot of these vendors just aren't available online. So for us, the challenge was reaching out to the vendors, getting them online and getting them bookable. Those first bookings were happening in a way that was super manual. We didn't have this robust platform that we have today.