Today we’re happy to unleash the first of a series of Surprises that come with the Vacation Rental World Summit.

“Hey folks, my name is Matt Landau and I’m the founder of the Vacation Rental Marketing Blog, which is a free resource designed to help owners and managers establish more independence about their vacation rental marketing.

When I first got started in the vacation rental industry myself with my vacation rentals here in Panama it was very much an accident. What I found these days is that a lot of owners or managers really just stumble into the industry whether they’re looking to cover a mortgage or make some money off an empty beach home; or in a lot of cases you just heard from a friend or family member about VRBO or HomeAway or Airbnb and you put up your property and all of a sudden you start hosting guests .

So that much is amazingly beautiful about the vacation rental industry that just about anyone with a property can get started by hosting guests immediately and that’s a wonderful thing.

What I typically found with my own situation and what I’m increasingly seeing with others is that following that process hosts begin to explore more options.

We post a hypothetical “what would happen if your favorite listing site were to disappear tomorrow?” and it really brings up a lot of questions as to the sustainability of your marketing and sustainability of your vacation rental business. Ideally, something that you want to be passing down from generation to generation.

But it does require some effort and the downfall of such a new industry is that that kind of information, that kind of flow is very much lacking.

One of the biggest disadvantages to an emerging space like ours is this kind of fragmentation because as independent owners and managers most of us are sitting in our own offices, some of us have an assistant or a spouse or a small staff that’s helping out but in general the sharing of information is very much hindered.

And in that sense, an event like Antonio’s is incredibly important for the industry as a whole.

As everything begins growing up, to have experts like these sharing tips is incredibly important simply because without this kind of exposure most of us are stuck in our own little caves. And the more these kinds of events begin to take place the more we can begin holding one another accountable as my own boss and that often times is a tricky thing.

So I thougt it might be helpful to share three important things to remember when you attend a summit like this or if you’re just beginning to explore more sustainable vacation rental practices in general.

So the first thing that you want to remember when you’re consuming lots of high quality information from experts is your priorities.

Often times when I’m at a summit or a conference I hear so many great ideas and I’m jotting them down that ultimately I arrive at some sort of “analysis paralysis” and I don’t simply know what to do next because there’s so much to do.

So when you’re consuming these ideas and getting excited, I would highly recommend that you determine whether or not the bit of advice is strategic or actionable and if it’s a strategic bit of advice, if it’s a theme that you wanted to remember day to day, I would recommend that you jot that down and set it apart from the rest.

When it comes to the actual actionable tips that you’d like to begin implementing, what I like to use is something that’s called “the Prioritization Matrix“, and this is what it looks like:

The “Prioritization Matrix” asks you two very critical questions: the first question is does this item need to happen now? and that’s a very important question to be considering upon any tips that you hear.

For your vacation rental business, does this tip needs to happen immediately?

The second question is how important is it as it relates to your vacation rental business? Is it something that’s of high importance or is it something that maybe can wait?

What I’d like to recommend you do when you are consuming this kind of information, when you’re exposed to all these experts, is to take the tips of your learning and force yourself to put them into one of these quadrants.

Obviously, the items that are highly important and highly urgent after the seminar are the items you want to begin immediately working on, whereas the things that you find fascinating but maybe are a little bit less urgent or less important specifically as it relates to your vacation rentals, those are the ones you can set on the back burner.

This is a very important thing to consider, because all vacation rental hosts have different skill levels, have different needs and have different interests. So use this prioritization matrix to make sure that your priorities are always coming first.

The second thing to remember when you’re consuming lots of really great information from experts is something called “the Feedback Loop” and for me that at all starts with ants!

Yes ants! Ants have been around for hundreds of millions of years and they basically have built into them a feedback loop which is a very profound way to change behavior. It’s basically the process of presenting individuals with something informative about the way that they are acting and giving them the opportunity to change or react to it and as independent owners and managers consuming this great information, I consider it our responsibility to the greater industry as a whole to take that information and feed it back into our own loops in our own regions. For some people that might be a LinkedIn group, for some might be a vacation rental owners Association.

Whatever it looks like for you, it’s our fiduciary responsibilities as independent owners and managers that are privy to this kind of information, to make sure that we’re documenting not only coming from the experts but also then sharing it back with people who can benefit. That’s an incredibly important mechanism that our industry ultimately needs to evolve in the best way possible.          

So you’ve got you prioritization matrix ready to go, you’re prepared to take what you learn and share in feedback loops of your own, the third thing that I’d like to ask you to remember is that there’s wisdom in the crowds.

A lot of times we can get frustrated that some big wigs are making all the decisions for our industry but what’s important to remember is that as groups of Independent owners and managers we oftentimes have the ability to solve problems, to innovate, to make the right decisions, and even ultimately to predict the future in a better way than any elite few ever could.

So it’s very important to remember as now an ambassador of this high-level information that on behalf of an evolving industry, we must act as a group, we must share this information properly in order to see things grow the way that we believe they should.

Those are my big three things to remember.

My friend Persilio here has asked if he could be part of the presentation and I’m never going to turn him down.

I’ve asked Antonio to share with you guys the prioritization matrix, so that you can actually print it out and use it alongside your computer when you’re attending the Summit.

Persilio, tienes algo que quieres decir? (is there anything you want to add?)

Persilio: “Si, para decir que señor Matt buena gente y muy inteligente y le sigo los que dice a usted.”

He said that I’m an intelligent person and that he always takes my advice and you should to.

So that’s it for me, I look forward to hearing from you guys and have a tremendous summit!”