Hostkeep is a full service short-stays property management team based in Melbourne. They help property owners increase rental cashflow.

They started out with 1 Airbnb property. Over the course of 2+ years, they grew from managing their individual properties to managing properties on behalf of other owners.

Before Stephen (the Managing Director) and Dan (the Director of Operations) started using Hostaway to manage their listings, they built their own stack of technology to make running daily business operations less painful. Eventually, they tried different solution providers such as Guesty, which ended up being too complex, and OrbiRental.

One of the biggest pain points was automating messaging. They built a solution themselves using Zapier, then switched to using a more comprehensive solution, such as SmartBnb - a game changer because it was one of the mature pieces of software they had found on what they were looking for in messaging.

They were getting too big for Airbnb and needed to use a multi-channel approach. Stephen and Dan started to look for other solutions and eventually came across Hostaway. All of the original channel managers were too expensive so Hostaway was the bestalternative to fill that gap.

“Hostaway could give us a flat rate per property for the channel management at the start and we used the other providers for the other services. Obviously over time, we decided to move away from other providers and have everything centralised including messaging as Hostaway had built this and we moved fully to you as our only platform”

Hostaway’s all-in-one channel management software allowed them to use features such as:

—A unified inbox, message templates, and automations that allowed them to communicate with guests on channels such as Airbnb, Booking.com, and more

—Pricing tools that helped them update rates on every channel

—A mobile app that lets them access their whole business on the move

—Our global sales and support team that’s happy to help at any time

“Hostaway allowed us to cut down on our costs as we were able to move away from having 6 different technology providers for different aspects of the functionalities we’ve built to a single step which is really cool”

With Hostaway, Hostkeep no longer had to rely on so many different systems to make their business work. They could consolidate their business into a singe-user interface and mature their business.

Not only did this help Stephen and Dan grow their business but it made onboarding new people a lot easier. The new members of the operations team could get comfortable with one software to be trained on.

Stephen could be more hands-off and was able to hand off parts of the business such as guest communications and all of the knitty-gritty details. He could now focus on scaling and preparing for the acquisition strategy.