4th Annual DARM Battleground-Battleground 2022 Reveals Strengths/Weakness of Industry’s Vendor Landscape

Participants in each year’s battleground step onto an intensely lit stage knowing they only have about four minutes to talk about their platform. And that’s before being questioned by a panel of top vacation rental owners. This year the battles were moderated by Tim Cafferty, owner and president of Outer Banks Blue Realty, co-host of the Sarah and T podcast, alongside Jim Olin, CEO of C2G Advisors LLC. Not exactly a duo that is tone down the intensity of the moment.

Needless to say, the pressure was on for the fourth annual DARM battleground. Once the attendees voted, Key Data Dashboard walked away with the award for their comp data sets, which tells you which pain point resonated the most with revenue managers.

Since getting individual demos of these products takes valuable time, these battleground minutes are highly valuable. They are an opportunity to lay out what makes a product unique from its competition and what it does better than others so that potential clients can choose who to follow up with based on their custom needs. It’s also a great opportunity to announce product updates and roadmaps.

In several instances, the presenters did not make their value proposition clear, or even whether it was a software or service or both. This led the panel members to ask as a follow up question. For example, most of the presenters get their data from the same sources. What is done with that data and how it’s priced are usually unique to each solution.

Here are summarized notes about what each battling company said they offer (in order of appearance):

AirDNA – Max Berstein, Director of Product

AirDNA built a short-term rental intelligence platform to put all the right data at your fingertips.

·       What is unique: Their scraping technology is their unique differentiator because they have the best geographically with the best detailed data

·       Cost: MarketMinder is a consumer product up to $99 a month

·       New features: short-term rental calculator has the amount of revenue a property would make annually

Beyond – Ryan Saler, Head of Partnerships

Beyond analyzes a billion data points daily to set the best price — automatically for yourshort-term rentals.

·      What is unique: Insights dashboard showing users’ portfolios and then all the way down to the listings

·      Cost: Not discussed

·      New features: Overhauling the “nearby listings” so users can set and build their own comp set and track it against index performance all in one view

Buoy -  Tim Speicher, CEO and Co-Founder

Bouy automatically prices and reports on vacation rentals. It works autonomously and recalculates market conditions as soon as they change.

·       What is unique: A comp set is created automatically every week and they have no base rate, which is “cumbersome”

·       Cost: $30 per listing per month or performance pricing

·       New features: the entire company is new

Got2Go – Rosario ‘Craig’ Musumeci, CEO and Founder

Got2Go is an OTA made by hosts, for hosts offering some of the lowest fees on the market.

·      What is unique: OTA based on live events created by hosts who wanted something different (also unique was showing a video created by an LA Raiders kicker with a message to DARM about their product)

·      Cost: Fee is 10%

·      New features: The entire company is new (launched the day before the conference)

Key Data Dashboard – Tyler Ashby, Customer Success Leader (and Battleground Winner)

Key Data Dashboard offers an ensemble of business intelligence (BI) tools that tell the story of your company’s key metrics with easy-to-grasp dashboards of the 30-plus KPIs that are most important to you.

·      What is unique: Because they are the largest source of directly vetting booking data they can use that to educate our assumptions about scraped data and they integrate with 30 different property management software platforms

·      Cost: Starts at free for some reports

·      New features: They are adding hotel data to key leisure markets for comp sets

OwnerPoint – Larry Hoffer, Company Founder and CEO of Rentalz Holdings LLC

OwnerPoint is a complete technology and marketing platform that allows property managers to identify, target, and onboard the most desirable properties in their destinations.

·      What is unique: Integrated with property management software

·      Cost: $349/month or $233/month if listings are placed on their OTA Rentalz.com

·      New features: the entire company is fairly new

PriceLabs –  Aviva Llorens, Customer Success Expert

AI designed for giving property managers the same chance for success at revenue management as larger companies. No more manually adjusting minimum stay and check-in/check-out settings in your PMS.

·      What is unique: Minimum stay recommendation engine and its sheer number of customizations available, especially seasonally

·      Cost: starts at $20 per listing

·      New features: Uses “block removal logic” from scraped data

Rented – Chris Mills, Director of Sales

Rented’s dymaic pricing software for vacation rentals, Art, is built by industry professionals, for industry professionals. Art helps rental managers set the right price for every property, every night.

·      What is unique: UX is designed for ease of use, designed to make bulk updates quickly and immediately  

·      Cost: Starts with a free account

·      New features: None specifically mentioned

RevMax – Desiree Sandoval-Garcia, Co-founder/Corporate Director

RevMax is a vacation rental revenue management system and consulting company that provides property managers leading revenue management technology aloing with industry expert support.

·      What is unique: Organizes users’ approach from “beginner” to “advanced” based on how much involvement they want to have in their tool, and their length of stay pricing tool

·      Cost: $30/unit

·      New features: Born out of Streamline, they are now their own company and have integrations with PMS systems

Vintory – Brian Riggs, Head of Sales

Vintory built an end-to-end technology platform specifically engineered to help vacation rental managers scale their inventory.

·      What is unique: Data scientists on staff for managing the data sets pulled for the clients 

·      Cost: Starting at $299/month

·      New features: Integrates with MLS systems locally where available and rental income estimator tool

Ximplifi – Jesse Ehret, Founder and CXO (2022 winner of DARM’s Technology Innovation Award)

Ximplifi’s flagship integration software, VRPlatform. Automatically syncs data from property management software, booking channels, and merchant processors into a cloud-based accounting system.

·       What is unique: only product of its kind that integrates accounting systems for property management companies and is also a fully outsourced accounting service

·       Cost: $6 per unit with a 10 unit minimum

·       New features: The company is new and integrates with QuickBooks

Wheelhouse – Andrew Kitchell, Founder and CEO  (2021 winner of DARM’s Innovation of the Year)

Wheelhouse is a platform that gives actionable insights to users, from understanding performance to better nightly pricing.

·      What is unique:  Instead of dynamic pricing tools sitting on top of the data, users can build their strategy based on the demand coming in and can level up depending on what they want to add in, and is referred to as “fully in control,” as well as transparency into how their tool works

·      Cost: Starts at $20/month

·      New features: The “fully in control” approach to dynamic pricing where a rate strategy and model can be built from the foundation by the user