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Thibault is the founder of Rental Scale-Up. He owns vacation rentals in St. Barths and Bali. He also leads innovative projects for companies within the vacation rental industry. Feel free to reach out to Thibaut Masson on Linkedin.

Why attend Rent Responsibly’s free educational online conference (July 12 – 13)?

rent responsibly conference

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For local inhabitants and businesses, the disaster is also economic. Florida is a big travel market. With great beaches and world-famous attractions such as Walt Disney World and Universal Studios, the state attracts many families who book a vacation rental for their stay. Cities like Orlando and Kissimmee usually rank high in market size for vacation rental revenues.

Our partner Rent Responsibly is organizing a free educational conference on July 12 – 13, called the RR Summit. This summer’s theme is “Paths to professionalization”. The event is organized along tracks that match your needs. You can register for it on Zoom Events here. If you sign up, you will get access to the recordings of all the sessions. For instance, there is a track for seasoned vacation rental managers and one for first-time short-term rental owners. Below, you will find the details of the four tracks, called playlists here, that you can attend. To let you know about the conference, we’ve interviewed David Krauss, Rent Responsibly’s co-founder.

Rent Responsible conference: The content

RR SUMMIT PLAYLIST 1: Personal and Community #Wellbeing 

#Hospitality is about more than just guests – it’s about taking care of ourselves and our communities. If this resonates with you, bookmark these sessions at the RR Summit:

  • 🌱 #Sustainability is Good For Your Business – with Bob Garner of Casal dei Fichi
  • 🏳️‍🌈 #Inclusivity Matters: Creating Welcoming Spaces for #LGBTQ+ Guests – with @Robert seller of Robert Geller (He/Him/His) of FabStayz Inclusive Accommodations
  • ♿ #Accessibility Matters: Increasing STR Access to More Travelers – with Lorraine Woodward of Becoming rentABLE
  • 🫁 From #Burnout to Balance with Radical Self-Care – with yours truly and Dana Lubner from RR, plus a LIVE #breathwork session and exclusive gift with special guest Samantha Skelly of Pause Breathwork!

RR SUMMIT PLAYLIST 2: Advocacy & Regulations 

If you haven’t already faced regulatory discussion in your market, you will. This playlist covers the essentials you’ll need to be ahead of the curve.

  • 🍎 #regulations 101: How They’re Made, Trends, + Ask a Policy Expert – with Alexa Nota and Noah Stewart from Expedia Group
  • ✅ Top 10 #Advocacy Resources & How to Take Advantage of Them – with Alexa Nota and Dana Lubner
  • 🔮 Founders of the Future: A Crystal Ball Discussion on the Next 5 Years – with David Krauss, Darren Pettyjohn from Proper Insurance, Jeremy Gall of Breezeway, and Andrew Schulz of NoiseAware, moderated by Alexa Nota

RR SUMMIT PLAYLIST 3: Experienced Hosts and Property Managers  

Been around the STR block? There’s still no limit to what you can learn and how you can grow! The summer 2022 RR Summit has sessions for all experience levels, but here’s a hand-picked playlist for experienced hosts, property managers, and your staff:

  • 💵 The Foundations of #DynamicPricing & Using Revenue Management to Get Great Guests – with Andrew Kitchell of Wheelhouse
  •  ⭐ The Future of #GuestExperience & Tech-Enabled Stays – with Steve Davis of Operto
  • 🦺 The Fundamentals of Implementing a #Safety Program – with Justin Ford of Breezeway
  • 📊 Sustainable #BusinessModels and Smart Financial Hygiene – with Gernot Zechner of AJL Atelier and Maria DiCarlo and Jason Thomas of Raincatcher
  • 🌐 The Future of #DirectBookings is #Web3 – with Eric Pace and Cynthia Huang of Dtravel

RR SUMMIT PLAYLIST 4: First-Time STR Owners and New Hosts

New to #shorttermrentals? Welcome! Consider RR Summit July 12-13 your jumpstart to professional development and connecting with others in the industry! Start here:

  • 🛡️ NoiseAware: How To Protect Your Properties & Profits From Surprise Operations Costs – with Andrew Schulz
  • ✔️ Avalara: 5 Steps to Lodging #Tax Compliance – with Ben Rosema
  • 🏠 Proper Insurance®: The State of the STR #Insurance Marketplace – with Nick Massey
  • ✈️ Vrbo: #Traveler-First Vacation Rental Experiences and #Trends – with Carmela Gillenwater
  • 📈 Key Data Dashboard: From Analysis to Action: #Data-Informed Rental by Owners – with Taylor Berry

You can register for it on Zoom Events here.

Rent Responsibly interview, with co-founder David Krauss

What is Rent Responsibly?

We are a community building and education platform for local short-term rental alliances. That may not be completely clear to everybody. Let me tell you what the problem we’re solving is. Fundamentally there is a vacuum in our space: On a local level, hosts, managers, and even other small business stakeholders have trouble connecting and finding each other. It’s easier to find guests than it is to find other hosts, owners, and managers in your community. We’re bridging that gap through building a platform that all owners, hoss, and managers at a local level can join and then build community. Ultimately, we provide education through that platform that people need to be successful.

How did you become involved in co-founding Rent Responsibly? 

David Krauss (Rent Responsibly): As a host in Dallas, starting in 2013, I fell in love. I loved hosting. I love meeting people. It gave me the opportunity to be the entrepreneur that I always was, but didn’t know how to find my way to that self-reliance. That was ultimately the story many people have. 

In my early hosting days, I had one incident where somebody had a party at my rental. That led me to want to build a solution to that noise nuisance issue. That led to the founding of NoiseAware, which led to meeting tens of thousands of hosts.

2015 to 2020 was the period of the mainstreaming of short-term vacation rentals. People were looking for solutions, looking for the rules of the road that would help them get there. Ultimately, it gave the themes that Rent Responsibility is built on:

  • Collaborate,
  • Educate,
  • and Celebrate.

If you do all of those things well, that is effectively advocacy. But advocacy is not something anybody wants to do year-round. I mean, advocacy is when you’re trying to advocate for something and there are two sides to the argument. I don’t believe that’s going to be the way our space is forever. The rules of the road will get settled. When we, as a community, look at ourselves and say “we need to collaborate with each other one”. We need to collaborate with other businesses, educators, and service providers. And that requires a platform. A common space where you can do that. That’s where you can find that education

You can find the rules that exist today. If everybody already knew how to operate appropriately, professionally, a lot of these problems would go away in the first place. To be honest, that’s what the world wants from us. They want us to educate ourselves. And then lastly is celebrate rent. We actually started by producing stories called humans of short-term rentals. People don’t understand what we, as the hosting community, do and the value we bring in the jobs and the economics and the, just the trend lines of where the world is going. The world wants to stay in short-term rentals. We have to find that balance, and, ultimately, Rent Responsibly is the platform where hosts can find each other. They can collaborate. We produce high-quality education, not just what you need to do to be in good standing but also about professionalization, and all these other questions that people have. 

We do a ton of surveys and then just produce the education materials people need. What we’re seeing is that people respect hosting and municipalities want this higher quality elevated operation. I’m a strong believer that the vacation rental short-term rental owner, host, and manager community is the highest concentration of innovators, doers, and community-oriented people the world has ever seen. We just are disconnected. We’re fragmented. If we come together, the value prop just expands. And, as a leader of Rent Responsibly, I’m leading that mission. It’s working. People are responding really well to it.

What tools and programs is Rent Responsibly developing?

David Krauss (Rent Responsibly):  First and foremost, as a community building and education platform, we have to be good at building communities. What we do is empower local leaders to lead their own communities. We just help them find the other hosts in the area. My co-founder Alexa, when she started her Chapel Hill short-term rental alliance, it took her 40 hours just to set up all the tech, MailChimp and the website. All these things are a lot of work. A lot of people get burnt out before they get started.

So we’ve reduced that to four hours. Fundamentally we’re making it easy to build local short-term rental communities, alliances, etc.

Number two is we’re building high-grade professional education for those people. Most people, you hear this good apple, bad apple, good actor, bad actor.  It’s very blurry. Most people who are “not doing the right thing”, aren’t aware of what the right thing to do is with respect to getting a good standing and registration.

We’ve done a lot of surveys. Most people want to do what is right. They just need the roadmap to get there. And so we’re helping push that. People need a central place where on a local level, they can find what they need to know.

The last piece that we’re building is a megaphone. We need to celebrate the people and the output and the value of what we’re doing. The more we do this, the bigger the megaphone gets. This narrative was built early on about vacation rental short-term rentals not being additive to communities extracted it. This couldn’t be further from the truth. My personal experience was completely different. I had great relationships with my neighbors and I fundamentally was more on top of the game, adding more value. Now we’re really doing that at a scale and making it possible and easy.

Who are Rent Responsibly’s partners?

David Krauss (Rent Responsibly): How does rent responsibly run? We’re partne- supported. Here’s our 2022 partner class:  VRBO, Key Data, Breezeway, NoiseAware, Proper Insurance, AJL Raincatcher, Avalara, D-travel, Operto, and Wheelhouse.

We collaborate with them in different ways. These are the folks that are in the trenches with us, helping to build the education, helping to grow the communities that we’re supporting. Lastly, as we’ll talk about, I’m sure we have an event coming up. These folks help us put on events. They’re really focused again on our mission, community building, and education.

What is the Rent Responsibly conference about?

First, you need to know that it is a virtual event. That’s fundamentally important to us because this needs to be accessible to everybody. We’re using Zoom Events, which really creates a conference-like atmosphere. If you indulge me, I’ll tell you what this conference is about. So it’s the Rent Responsibly summit. We’re gonna be doing this four times a year in different various formats. We’ve brought all of our partners and a bunch of other organizations and people to speak. There are 20 sessions over two days, July 12th and 13th. We’ve created playlists. There are different tracks for different people and you don’t need to be there live to absorb all of it. Sign up, register, and you’ll get the videos as well. 

Here’s why you should register for the event.

  • Number one, what’s not talked about a lot, is our well-being. We are hustlers. We are hard workers in this space, but we sometimes forget to take care of ourselves. On our well-being track, we have, and also the community’s wellbeing.
  • Sustainability with Bob Garner
  • Inclusivity with Robert Geller, AFAB stays
  • Accessibility: How are we properly advertising for folks that need that information with Lorraine Woodward of becoming rentable
  • Lastly, from burnout to radical self-care, right? This is stuff I wish I had when I was burning both ends of the candle. That’s what Samantha Skelly of pause, breath work.

We also have a track for new owners, first-time STR owners, and new hosts with NoiseAware, Avalara, Proper Insurance, VRBO, and Key Data. 

I know you have a lot of experienced hosts and managers in your audience.

  • Dynamic pricing with Andrew Kitchell from Wheelhouse
  • We have guest experience with Steve Davidson from Operto
  • Safety with Justin Ford (Breezeway)
  • Financial hygiene. We don’t talk about that enough either. We have a track with AJL Atelier and Raincatcher
  • Direct bookings. What is Web 3? How is crypto interfacing with our space? We have a D-Travel session there.
  • Lastly, as we kind of started off advocacy and regulations, it’s the number one question we get, right? Number one question. So we’re addressing that with education. That’s what we do Regulations 101 with Noah Stewart, from Expedia, top 10 advocacy resources with our very own Dana and Alexa. 

Lastly, we have a crystal ball session where we’re getting some founders together. What do we want this space to look like? We’re going to do that again and say, what is this space going to look like in five years? 

You can register for it on Zoom Events here.

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