Short-Term Rental Expert Insights on Growth, Pricing, and Guest Experience
Get inspired by Paul’s short-term rental journey and uncover strategies that helped him scale quickly.
In this episode of the Hospitable Hosts podcast, we are joined by Paul Stewart, Owner of Cozy Cohost LLC, a full-service short-term rental management company. Paul and his wife, Ashley, started their STR business in 2020 with just one property that they bought in Atlantic City. Now they manage about 100 properties in the South Jersey Shore region and employ about 20 W-2 employees.
In the episode, Paul shares his STR journey and discusses the strategies that helped him build a thriving short-term rental management business. From hiring staff as their business grows to creating positive guest experience to handling property-related expenses, the conversation covers a wide range of topics. Paul also shares how he uses Hospitable to automate guest communication and set dynamic pricing, and offers tips on becoming an Airbnb co-host.
Press Play now to hear actionable insights on business growth, pricing strategies, and guest experience from a short-term rental expert.
Do you prefer to read the highlights? We’ve got a summary of the key takeaways below.
Growing Business in a Competitive STR market
Paul says the Jersey Shore market is highly competitive, with about 1,000 short-term rentals in the Atlantic City area, and it’s also quite seasonal. “Most of our revenue comes from the spring and summer months. And then depending on the weather, we can get a little bit more out of early spring or even going into early fall.”
Paul thinks they were lucky to scale to 100 properties without doing much marketing, mainly relying on word of mouth, but it required hard work. “As we were growing this business, I would work insanely hard and not overly charge clients, and through time, we developed a reputation for going above and beyond for clients. It's helped us scale at a higher pace.”
Paul also thinks that having in-house cleaning staff separates them from other property management companies in the Atlantic City area and helps attract clients. “We have better control of what's going on in the property because these cleaners have to do things exactly how we want them. We have SOPs for everything,” he emphasizes.
“Ultimately, I think we're giving so much value to the clients, and that shows through the properties, which then shows through the reviews and guests’ experiences, which then generates more booking revenue and occupancy, which then brings us more revenue. I think the main reason why we have been able to scale quicker and with more properties than a lot of our competitors is that we do things differently.”
About Dynamic Pricing
Paul admits that, at first, he was opposed to implementing dynamic pricing and didn’t like the idea of using a third-party pricing tool. “At that point, I felt like I'm better off just doing this myself,” he says. But Paul changed his approach as their business grew. “It was coming to the point where I just had to do something with pricing because I would spend a full week doing price optimization on 60 properties, just way too much time.”
So a year ago, Paul started using PriceLabs. Now, he is also using Hospitable’s built-in Dynamic Pricing feature for 90% of his properties, and he is “happy with the software that Hospitable rolled out.” Still, Paul thinks that although AI-powered dynamic pricing tools are helpful, you need to know your local market to set up the right pricing strategy.
“If you really want to optimize your prices properly, you can't just set it, leave it, and think that it's automatically going to do everything correctly for you. It's 100 percent not true, at least in my market,” he says.
“You have to know your market. You're going to have to make sure these specific settings are really in line with what you think will be the best bet for your occupancy and revenue. You must decide on your main objective. Is it occupancy, or the highest ADR that you think you can get?”
About Guest Communication
“Guest communication is definitely one of the quickest and, in my opinion, the easiest ways to satisfy your guests,” Paul emphasizes. You need to be responsive because guests always have questions and issues do happen, and they expect quick replies. Paul points out that communication with guests is something that you can control, and now it’s even easier with automated messages and AI, so there is no excuse not to do that.
Paul says that, in season, they may have hundreds of guests per week, so he and his wife answer guests, and they also have an operations manager who answers during the day and a VA from the Philippines who works overnight shifts. “Then we do have AI to back it up on the backside if we miss something. Right now, we’re using the AI messaging through Hospitable, which is really good. I’ve been extremely happy with it.”
About Cleanliness
Another aspect Paul focuses on to enhance the guest experience and earn great reviews is cleanliness. “Cleanliness is always going to be key in this business because, as we all know, if a guest finds one hair in a shower, especially when they first walk in, they're going to start to look for everything,” he notes.
Paul explains what they do to ensure high cleaning standards are consistently met across all their properties. “After our cleaning staff goes in, we have a cleaning supervisor, and we have an operations lead that are out in the properties. They will hit the properties as much as possible before guests arrive. The more we can get our operations staff to do walk-throughs after the cleaning staff is done, the more we can ensure that the property is up to par, which is then going to translate to five-star reviews.”
Listen to the full episode of the Hospitable Hosts podcast to get inspired by Paul’s short-term rental journey and uncover strategies that helped him scale quickly.
