Ekabo Home’s Journey to Success: Scaling Short-Term Rental Management with Hospitable

Welcome to Hospitable.com’s series of host case studies, where we take a deep dive into the unique experiences of our valued hosts. Through these inspiring success stories, we aim to showcase tips that can help you to succeed with your short-term rental business and better leverage your Hospitable subscription.

Ekabo Home has made a name for itself in Atlanta, Georgia’s short-term rental industry, thanks to its founder, Niyi Adewole, and his vision for combining property appreciation with cash flow generation. Starting with just one rental property in April 2021, Ekabo Home has grown into a thriving property management business, utilizing technology and automation to streamline operations and achieve success.

The first property

Niyi Adewole began his journey in the short-term rental market when he listed his first property in April 2021. He quickly realized the potential of investing in beautiful homes in great neighborhoods in order to benefit from appreciation, while still creating positive cash flow through short-term renting.

By August 2021, Niyi had purchased a second property, setting the stage for what would become Ekabo Home.

Growth through automation

After implementing systems that automated 80% of the day-to-day management tasks, Niyi was approached by other investors to manage their short-term rentals, and the Ekabo Home short-term rental property management team was born.

The team now includes two virtual assistants working remotely from Pakistan and the Philippines, and a guest experience manager based in Florida.

An Ekabo Home property in Decatur, GA

Niyi’s journey with Hospitable

Hospitable: What first made you start using Hospitable?

Niyi: Being able to automatically alert the cleaning team of checkouts and have them be able to see a dynamic schedule was the main driver for subscribing to Hospitable.com. I made the mistake of missing a cleaning update to the cleaning team and had a guest check into a place that was not cleaned, and the next week I thankfully found Hospitable. 

Hospitable: What is your favorite Hospitable feature and why?

Niyi: I can’t pick just one. I think my favorite thing about Hospitable as a company is the fact that it is ever-evolving and gets better each month. Even just recently there have been announcements for the new Direct Booking functionality and a ChatGPT integration. I also love the fact that the management team hosts public town halls every 2 weeks on Zoom, takes questions and feedback from hosts, and is constantly making the platform better based on that feedback. 

Hospitable: Do you have any other favorite tools that you use to automate the management of your short-term rentals?

Niyi: Yes, there’s a few actually…

A couple that aren’t really industry specific are Asana, for keeping track of maintenance management, and Google Sheets for property FAQ sheets to help our virtual assistants. Maybe FAQs are a feature that Hospitable could implement in the future though. 

And we also use Beyond, for their dynamic pricing. We recently integrated Beyond to allow us to control pricing across the board through hospitable. Gamechanger.

Hospitable: What are your future goals for your short-term rentals?

Niyi: Hospitable has played a huge part in our growth to this point and they will continue to play a huge part in our future. Our goal for this year is to go from 20 properties under management to 30 and I believe at the pace we’re moving we will hit that number by midsummer. 

We recently added Autohost onto the Hospitable platform and we plan to move more and more guests to direct and instant book without any restrictions because of the protection it gives us.

I truly enjoy utilizing Hospitable and we’re looking to connect all of our systems through there to create a seamless experience for guests.

Niyi’s top tip for other Hospitable hosts

Automate, automate, automate. Automate your guest messages. Automate your messages to cleaners. And ensure you’re delivering a seamless experience for guests.

Interested in checking out Ekabo Home’s short-term rentals for yourself?

You can find the Ekabo Home website here, built using Hospitable’s Direct platform.