The OwnerRez Blog

VacationRentalPeople.com is another listing site that we recently added inquiry integration for.  Here is a quick walkthrough on how to make your VacationRentalPeople.com inquiries show up in OwnerRez.

First, open the instruction page in the inquiry area.  This will show you your assigned @inquiryspot.com email address for each of your properties in OwnerRez.

Next, login to your VacationRentalPeople.com account.

After logging in, you'll see your properties listed on the VacationRentalPeople.com control panel homepage.  On the right side of each property, you'll see a list of links that you can use to edit the details for that property.  Click on the link labeled "Edit Your Contact Information Property Address and map" for the property you want to integrate.

At the top, you'll see several contact options.  Make sure the "Allow them to contact me by email" option is checked.  Then put your @inquiryspot.com email address in the field next to it.

Last, click the 'Save and Finish' button at the top right of the page.

As always, be sure to send a test inquiry to yourself by opening your property listing on vacationRentalPeople.com and filling out the inquiry form.  When it arrives in OwnerRez, you'll know the integration is complete.

We recently added inquiry support for five more listing sites.  Here is a quick walkthrough on how to make your VRWD inquiries show up in OwnerRez.

First, open the instruction page in the inquiry area.  This will show you your assigned @inquiryspot.com email address for each of your properties in OwnerRez.

Then, head over to VRWD and login.

After logging in, you'll see your properties listed on the VRWD control panel homepage.  Click on the Details button for the property you want to integrate.

In the property details, you'll see an 'Email' field which contains the email address that VRWD sends inquiries to for this property.  Put your @inquiryspot.com email address in that field.

Then click the 'Update Your Listing' button at the bottom of the page to save the new email address.

As always, be sure to send a test inquiry to yourself by opening your property listing on VRWD and filling out the inquiry form.  When it arrives in OwnerRez, you'll know the integration is complete.

If you need to integrate all your properties, you'll need to go property-by-property updating each one at a time.  There is no way to update multiple properties at one time.

Our inquiry management feature, released in August, has had enormous success.  We've processed several thousand emails and greatly reduced the amount of time it takes for owners to respond to inquiries.

Yesterday, we released an update that integrates with five more listing sites.  If you have a listing on any of the below websites, OwnerRez can now parse the incoming inquiry emails for you automatically.

New listing sites:

• VacationRentalPeople.com
• GetAwayDigs.com
• FreeVacationRentalSite.com
• ArrangeYourVacation.com
• VRWD.com

Over the next few days, I'll be posting specific information on how to integrate OwnerRez with each of these sites.  Most owners can probably figure it out on their own by using the inquiry instructions page.

I've never heard of these sites!  Who cares about these listings?

One of the themes behind OwnerRez has always been owner independence.  Instead of building our software around a few major brands in the industry (e.g. HomeAway), our integration strategy is to allow for a broad range of different scenarios.

We're aware that these sites don't get the same type of traffic that the bigger ones currently do, but a) most of these sites are free so it'll cost you little-to-nothing to go add your listing, b) some of these sites get better traffic in specific areas where the bigger ones don't, and c) these sites may grow in popularity over time.

What other listing sites do you use that you'd like us to integrate with?

What other inquiry features can we add to make your life easier?  Thing we're already working on:

• The ability to classify the listing site for an inquiry with a custom domain name
• Custom email responses with mail merge fields (this is an application-wide feature that is being worked on)
• The ability to send and receive all email from an owner-specific email address that can handle replies
• The ability to create custom parsers for owner or small listing sites
• API integration so that owner sites can pass inquiries directly to OwnerRez

In addition to changing charge types, we've also changed phone types.  The phone types list is scattered throughout the interface, from the control panel to the public guest forms, so you'll see these changes in quite a few places.

The old list of phone types was much bigger:

• Assistant
• Business
• Business 2
• Business Fax
• Callback
• Car
• Company
• Home
• Home 2
• Home Fax
• Isdn
• Mobile
• Unknown
• Other Fax
• Pager
• Primary
• Radio
• Telex
• TTY/TDD

Our reason for consolidating the list down to the new values was very straightforward: we like simple pragmatic options.

The old list was copied from some CRM system that one of the developers used a year ago, and it's been a source of humor and target for derision ever since.  Who the heck uses an ISDN modem anymore, and - more importantly - why would you care about recording that number?

A simple query of the database showed that, across many thousands of bookings, no one used most of the types.  So we consolidated.

All 'Company' and 'Business' types were merged into 'Work'.  All weird types were removed.  The list is now clean and simple.

We've changed the charge types that you see throughout the interface to use different values.

"Charge types" is the drop-down list that displays on each line item on the editable charge grid.  These "types" allow you to categorize each line item.  If you open the charges on a quote or booking, you'll notice the new list of charge types.

The old list of charge types was a bit bigger:

• Rent
• Discount
• Cleaning Fee
• Processing Fee
• Tax

'Cleaning Fee' and 'Processing Fee' were removed because the new custom surcharges feature makes them obsolete.  Since you can now have any kind of surcharge you want, it doesn't make sense to call out cleaning and processing as specific charge types.  Instead a new 'Surcharge' type covers all of them.

'Discount' was also removed because we determined that it doesn't make sense from an accounting standpoint to use it as a type.  Integrating with QuickBooks and other accounting software is a big part of our To-Do list so we think about the accounting implications of everything we do.  While discounts are definitely a big part of the booking process, from an accounting standpoint, they are merely a reversal or credit of some other rent or surcharge that was previously billed.  In other words, the concept of a "discount" doesn't exist unless the guest is charged something else which the discount applies to.  A free booking cannot be discounted because there is no charge on which the discount would apply.  The type of charge should always reflect how the item will be accounted financially.  Is the charge rent, in which case it is taxable?  Is it a cleaning charge that isn't taxable?  A "discount" should always be accounted for in the same way that the charge it is discounting is.  So if you're discounting the overall rent, the discount line item would have a 'Rent' type with some description like "Discount for last minute booking" with a negative rate.