Speaker: Hey, welcome to Keynote.
I'm your host, Steve Schwab.
Today I am here with David nti.
David Angotti has been a personal friend of mine for many years now.
Uh, David has a fantastic background starting with a company called Speedy
Prep, in which he was one of the first people ever gamify online learning.
He's been a pilot, A OTA, and if you dunno what OTA it is essentially built websites.
That outperformed Airbnb and VRBO in his markets.
He's an ultra marathon runner and worked for NetJets as a pilot.
More recently, he's been the brand ambassador for guesty, and
today he's coming on as our senior advisor to Cago for our la casa.com
and Casago.com
initiatives.
David, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Steve.
David, something else that you did that was relevant to what
we'll be talking about today is you were also a property manager.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you know, before I was a property manager, I was just like a
lot of people listening to this podcast.
I was a property owner and what led me into property management was,
was ultimately frustrations I had with different property managers.
And so everybody that's listening to this podcast, I've been in your, your
shoes and I know what you're feeling.
I know.
Exactly why each booking matters.
I know what it's like to refresh the owner portal and see another booking
come in and feel that excitement.
And that's really what we're talking about today is how, how can we use the
web assets, the website effectively to drive those results for you.
Speaker: David, as we've gone into this project originally, you were
there just helping me as a friend, and you started seeing the opportunity.
With vacasa, which is going to be your main initiative now, what led
you to see that there was a lot of upside and opportunity in vacasa?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Look, you called me and you're like, Hey, let's, let's, let's do this thing.
And when I heard the thing is, go head to head with Airbnb, vrbo and booking.com.
That's a little scary as somebody that understands websites really, really well.
Website conversions and driving traffic.
When you have to go head to head with brands like that, it's not always
something you're excited about.
I've been doing this for a while now, however, when, when you, uh, came to
Nashville with the marketing team, we looked at the website, we looked
at the performance of it already.
It became obvious that there was a huge opportunity here to really maximize
the foundational work that had been done over many years prior to that
point, and actually go head to head with those household name brands and
provide value for all our stakeholders.
Speaker: With that foundation that had been built, you saw a ton of opportunity
in the upside for the initiatives that aren't being done right now.
Maybe you can talk a little bit about how you're thinking about
getting people to the website.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can give an example of that.
So if you rewind a year ago, back before the merger.
The website was spending seven figures, so a lot of money on driving paid traffic.
So this ad you might see on Google or other places, it was driving
those website visitors to the tune of seven figures a month in spend.
So it wasn't a small budget.
That's back when vacasa was a publicly traded company.
So we, we take it private.
I'm involved behind the scenes a little bit with you on that and looking
at the website all along the way.
And here we are now.
We are today at four times the spend of what vacasa was spending as a
publicly traded company a year ago.
So when we look at like a recent month, we're spending four times
as much on paid marketing efforts.
And somebody could look at that from the outside and be like,
well, why would you do that?
It's one of the things I bring to the table is the relationships.
So I knew a company called Seer Interactive that I was good friends with
the owner of, and immediately reached out to Will over there and said, Hey,
I need you to look at this account.
Help me find the opportunities here to actually go head to head
with with Airbnb, with booking.com,
with VRBO because my homeowners need bookings on vacasa.
Because I want to have an additional booking channel beyond those other
ones, because when we can plug one more demand source in that has tons and tons
of visitors coming in, then all of a sudden, uh, we, we have higher revenue
per home, which serves everybody's needs.
Well,
Speaker: you know, really at the end of the day, our job to find a way to take
care of homeowners, making sure that we're giving our homeowners a advantage.
To be able to have the sort of economics that we hope to get them by having a
website that is truly one of the top five websites for vacation rentals in
Speaker 2: the United
Speaker: States.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so here we are.
We have this, this top vacation rental website.
It's just, I hate to say it, but it's been kind of neglected.
There's, there've been some layoffs at at vacasa through the years and
because of that, the team was having to wear a lot of different hats at once.
And so one of the first things I did when I came on as senior advisor was
look at where are the opportunities where we can put some money.
Get huge returns as quick as possible.
Mm-hmm.
And so the paid marketing was definitely one of those.
But another way we've, we've been, we've been doing this, was looking at where
there's friction in the buying experience.
So because the website hadn't had a redesign in a while or a rebrand in a
while, or even have people making as many modifications to it, we're able
to to go in and find some of those friction points that we all experience
it when we, when we shop online, right?
Like, why do they have this button in this place?
Why, why do I have to go through 16 fields to get to checkout those things
that cause those frustrations for us are, uh, what's known as conversion
rate optimization opportunities.
So I have a team of two people that are working on that right now.
These are highly skilled people that are doing user research.
They're talking to people that are actually booking the rentals.
They're watching people's face to see the, the frustration as they
go through the booking process.
And we're trying to identify what was it that caused that frustration?
Let's fix it.
And then more people will not just come to the site, but convert on the site.
Speaker: So we're already spending four times the amount of money on our
search marketing to make sure that we're pushing potential guests to the website
and then you're working on when they get there, converting more of them.
To actual renters once they're on the website so that we drive even more
Speaker 2: demand for homeowners.
Is that right?
Yeah.
So basically, how do we get more people into what we call the funnel,
which is really just the website.
How do we get 'em onto the website to start with?
And we have just so many initiatives around that.
And then once they're on there, when I put a hundred people across any given page on
that website, how many of that 100 people.
Buy something.
And the idea with conversion optimization is through incremental
testing over and over and over again, we get to a higher percentage of
that a hundred people purchasing.
Reason this matters is it all starts to work like flywheels because all
of a sudden when you have a slightly higher percentage purchasing, you
can spend exponentially more on Google ads, for example, because
the Google ads are more profitable.
Mm-hmm.
And so then now we can actually test faster because we have
more traffic coming in.
And so these things, uh, really almost start to work like a snowball
rolling down a hill, picking up speed, all just there to help our owners.
Earlier you
Speaker: talked about relationships and some of the relationships
you bring to the table.
And, you know, will Reynolds is known throughout, , the, the search industry
as truly like one of the leaders, not only in data and understanding websites
in ways others don't, but also as you know, an agency helping people like us
drive more demand for our homeowners.
But what's really fun about that relationship is one of
his key people named Ash.
Is actually a homeowner of ours, which is really
Speaker 2: cool.
It is it, it's a best case situation when you can have somebody that is on
the team helping us figure out how to spend, how to drive results, how to
drive more bookings for homeowners, and that person happens to be a homeowner.
That's what I call skin in the game.
He wants to see all of his clients succeed, but you can bet that
there's a little bit more of a desire to see us succeed when
he has his house on the program.
Speaker: Sure.
Talking about
Speaker 2: being
Esteban: like vested right and understanding the end result
that's right.
. , As we.
Think about the benefits of this merger between vacasa and Casago.
If you were previously a Casago homeowner, the significance of bringing vacasa to
those homeowners is incredibly valuable because you know the traffic of vacasa
outsizes the traffic from casago.com,
in a dramatic fashion.
. Then also for those who were already with vacasa and are with us today, they're
getting to see the added value of taking this website and building into something
really special underneath your guidance.
Speaker 2: The way, I would think about this is if I'm a homeowner.
vacasa is going to drive a similar number of bookings as Airbnb or
vrbo once we're done with it.
For some of you, it already might be doing that.
Some of our homes are already getting 30 to 35% of their total bookings
from vacasa, and so if you're coming from casago, that's, pretty exciting.
This is another channel.
It's like if, if somebody were to tell you could get another Airbnb.
To drive bookings.
That's what we're talking about.
Only the difference is this is run by people that have owned
and managed properties that have your best interests in mind.
It's run by people that have, operated Main street businesses
instead of Wall Street businesses.
People that get what makes you tick, people that have properties still today.
Mm-hmm.
So it's, it's run a little bit differently, but it's
the same kind of volume.
The other thing I would say is even if you're on the vacasa side, where
you've already had a property on vacasa, again, we're spending four times as
much this year on ads as last year, and we're spending it more efficiently
and we're investing more and more.
You know, I've, I just had days of meetings , with the team here about
how we can invest in this website to drive results for each and every owner.
So that that's, that's what I would say about that.
Yeah.
Speaker: It's really exciting times.
I'm so grateful that we're getting to work together on this project.
As we think about going forward, what are some of the opportunities you
see in the future with the casa.com,
with search marketing, with search engine optimization?
How do you think about the go forward over the next couple years
Speaker 2: With this website?
Right now, there's so much low hanging fruit.
We go after that.
First we figure out how, how, if we've already been able to four
times our, our marketing spend, can we eight times it, , how big can we
take that and still pro provide those positive results for, for homeowners?
What does conversion optimization look like?
Where we're, we're removing those friction points?
How, how far can we take that, where we get incremental
gains that turn exponential.
Uh, on the content side, we're going to be doing a lot of fantastic
content marketing initiatives.
That's typically been my background.
Uh, not the paid side as, uh, as much as the, the content marketing,
so I'm really excited to roll up my sleeves and help out on that.
Generative engines like chat, GPT and the other ones out there, they're
already starting to drive bookings.
We have some of the, the top minds in the world already working on driving
bookings from sources like that.
So this isn't going to be the one magic bullet that that solves things.
Rather, it's going to be this, this, what we call omni-channel marketing initiative.
Or we're gonna be using email, we're going to be using our
app, we're going to be using.
Paid organic, which is that free traffic from the search engines.
We're gonna use all of that to holistically market every single property
in the Cago and vacasa ecosystem.
Speaker: David, as you know, this podcast is for our homeowners and we
have the same called The Orange Reto.
And for our homeowners who don't know what the orange Reto is, uh, we
came up with a set of principles that we hold ourselves accountable to.
And we talk about it literally every single day in our, uh,
offices with our teammates.
And it's how we believe that we build a culture and a common language and instill
our values and principles along with our teammates to make sure that we're making
good decisions on our homeowner's behalf.
David, what's your favorite letter from the Orange Reto
Speaker 2: and why?
So it's owner centric.
The reason it's owner centric.
I operated a property management company over 10 years ago now, and
when I operated my property management company, we believed we should treat each
owner as if they were the only owner.
That was something I tried to instill with with my employees from day
one, and my thinking was we didn't have a business if we didn't have
owners, and they were the most.
Critical customer.
They held the inventory.
They were everything to the business.
Without the owners, we had nothing.
And so I can assure you whether we're talking a website decision or
something else, I'm very owner centric.
Mm-hmm.
Still, I own properties.
I get what this is like.
Owner centric is by far my favorite one.
Speaker: Yeah, it's my favorite too.
And I use all of the different letters.
I always gravitate back towards that like you do.
And the truth is, when you make decisions on your owner's best
interests, you're also making decisions on your own best interest.
Right.
Yeah.
And I'm just such a believer in that.
, I appreciate you spending the time talking to our homeowners and letting them get to
know what's going on with our initiatives.
Any final words you might have for our homeowners?
Speaker 2: Just that I'm, I'm excited about this chapter, this, both the
chapter of vacasa, but also, you know, as we've been talking about how the
local markets are going to be just so well represented with franchisees.
The on the ground people that care deeply about the owner's, back to owner centric,
that each owner's gonna have the ability to meet and talk to that lives right
there in their market and that they know that's an exciting time that's coming.
Speaker: Yeah, it's really exciting time to be able to get that locally
owned and operated business.
Back into the hands of those who love the communities, don't use the communities.
And then to be able to retain the casa.com
for our company, for our homeowners, for our teammates.
It's just the best of all worlds.
And David, thanks again for so much for coming on.
And homeowners, if you'd like more information, make
sure to check out cago.com
uh, to learn more about all the initiatives we're doing.
Have a great day.