Hi Everyone, 

I want to let you in on a little secret. Behind the scenes I have been working with Noah Weitzman, on a board with a lot of other great minds in the Bnb industry to bring to you a much needed service: an accounting/bookkeeping software specifically for short term rental owners. This software will save you hours and headaches every month by making accounting and bookkeeping faster and simpler while immediately giving you important metrics to help you manage and grow your business. Stick around because I’ve included an offer below to allow to become a Beta user for free!

Introducing BooksBnb - a fresh solution for short term rental owners! If you are a short term rental investor who is sick of spreadsheets and accounting apps not designed for short term rental investing, this is for you! Import all of your transactions from Airbnb and HomeAway/Vrbo in under a minute, so you can see metrics that actually matter to you. The platform allows you to switch between metrics for your individual properties and your entire portfolio easily for any date range. Save time while gaining new insights into your properties 

Noah was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule to answer some questions about the software, see the interview below:

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ZM: Hi Noah Thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us how the idea for BooksBnb came about?

NW:

Hey of course! We are short term rental hosts ourselves. The amount of spreadsheets that we had to track each property’s monthly performance, yearly performance, startup costs, return on investment and every other metric plus for the portfolio as a whole was insane! Let alone sharing all of those documents together and communicating the nuances in each spreadsheet. There are a ton of accounting apps out there but nothing made specifically for the world of short term rentals — half a hospitality business and rely on metrics akin to the hotel industry, and the other half a real estate business and need metrics to manage that portion. 

ZM: Can you tell us a bit about your background? Do you have a background in Accounting/Booking or are you the creative visionary? Is this the first company you’ve created?

NW:

 Aside from real estate, I most recently co-founded the company The Tallit which is a marketplace for Bar-Mitzvah/Bat-Mitzvah parents to connect with vetted vendors for their child's celebration.

For the product I designed it from the real estate side. As in, how would I feel this is most useful to me as a real estate investor to manage , grow my portfolio and save me time on accounting? One of the great parts has been actively using the software as we develop it for our properties and seeing the value that it gives. 

ZM: Despite the challenges of being a business owner, Entrepreneurship has always suited me as I like to dance to the beat of my own drum and in my employee days, I used to butt heads with managers because I thought I knew how to do things better. What about Entrepreneurship keeps you trudging through the hard parts of start-up life? 

NW:

Remembering how much I hated being an employee. I worked in the oil industry working 12 to sometimes 14 hour days in the Texas sun. Then I went into sales and had to make 100 cold calls a day. Whenever things get hard I just think about those days and realize how grateful I am to control my life and time. 

ZM: Amen to that! Earlier you mentioned that you are an Investor yourself, how many rental properties do you own?

NW: 

We, meaning myself and girlfriend, started back in 2016 with long term rentals and quickly fell in love with real estate. After eventually owning two long term properties, we decided to enter the short term rental market to grow our real estate even faster. We quickly bought two more properties and turned them into short term rentals and are currently working on our third.

 

ZM: What about real estate do you love? 

NW:

It is a tried and true method for making money where you can be your own boss. Creating a software or other company has many upsides but one of the downsides is that you are really creating a new concept and sometimes creating a new market. This makes it much more of a moonshot. With real estate there is a given set of methods/strategies that if you work hard on will make you money.

 

ZM: Since you are a short term operator yourself. Do you have any tips and tricks for the readers or some secret sauce you can share? 

NW:

Absolutely! 

First off, when researching a property/market, if you are using a third party software like AirDNA make sure that you also go to airbnb’s site and check the availability calendar of high performing properties to verify that the occupancy you are seeing on the site is similar to manually adding that up from some of the properties on airbnb. 

Second, when you find a property that works economically and legally with your local laws and you feel like it's good enough but doesn’t have that “it” or “airbnbey” factor. Don't be afraid to wait a couple more months or pay $10 to $30K more for a similar house that has that “it” factor. By “it” I mean the factor when people look at the first picture and say wow that’s exactly what i'm looking for and really fits into the whole reason I am visiting this location! To expand on this we have one STR with a very high “it” factor and one with an average “it”. Actually using BooksBnb we have seen that the high “it” factor rental generates about $1100 more profit a month and was only $30k more in purchase price. Also, when the market becomes more competitive the lower range houses are much more susceptible to market fluctuations than houses at the top range of a market. 

ZM: What problems are you trying to solve with the BooksBNB software? 

NW: 

Time and headache. Simply put. Save hours a month importing all of your transactions from HomeAway and Airbnb and immediately see metrics on them. Don't sort through mounds of spreadsheets stored who knows where. Have your business all in one place ready to show you what you need to do to grow. 

ZM: What is your “why” for creating this software? When I say “why”, I mean, how is this business serving your goals in life? A why could be more time with family, financial independence, a hope to make an impact in the world, etc. I wanted to get to know the person behind the product a bit as you seem like a serial entrepreneur and business creator. 

NW:

I know! I think I come off that way but it could not be further from the truth! The whole reason that we got into real estate and entrepreneurship was to make passive income so we can focus on our real passion which is helping the environment! I know that sounds cliche but all we want is to spend our life working on that. Unfortunately, working for non-profits doesn't make you much money to have a family, so we are hoping that this will allow us to finally go and do that full time. This could take a lot of shapes but one thing is to do free development or software engineering for some of the awesome companies out there fighting the good fight and protecting our planet. Another dream is to have our real estate and software business’s all join the 1% for the planet organization started by Yvon Chouinard the founder of Patagonia. Each business in this donates 1% of sales to the charity. 

ZM: Ooh I love hearing this and now I am so glad that I asked for your why. I feel a real kinship in fighting the good fight for the environment. What stage is the development process is the software in?  

NW: 

We are about to launch the BETA version of our software. What this means first is that anyone who signs up for the BETA and uses the software will get free access to the platform for life! Second, the BETA is a very lean version of what our end product will look like. Its purpose is to generate value for our initial users while proving to investors that this software is worth considerable monetary investment so we can create an all encompassing solution for short term rental hosts.  

ZM: If you are planning to roll services out in stages, what features can clients expect to see right away and what is the timeline for the rest? 

NW:

With the BETA, users will be able to upload their history of reservation data from Airbnb and HomeAway in under 60 seconds. They can then see visualizations and metrics on this for any date range they want and for any of their selected properties or group of selected properties. Clients can also add all of their expenses and see a broken down profit and loss table. 

Right now we are working on allowing the platform to read your upcoming income from Airbnb. This is specifically designed for hosts during coronavirus as it shows you how much income you already have on the books coming up and can make important decisions based on that. 

You can expect to see updates to the platform constantly. Using real time feedback, we are constantly iterating on current features and designing new ones based on what our user base demands. In other words, as a BETA user not only will you get a free platform but also your feedback could show up as the next feature!  

ZM: What will the service cost in the future? 

NW:

For all users who come with us on the journey and start using the product during the BETA period it will always be free! Once we are out of the BETA period there will be a cost for the platform but as to what that cost is and if it is based on number of properties or other metric has yet to be determined. 

ZM: If people are interested in signing up for Beta, where should they do that? 

NW: 

Go to www.booksbnb.com and enter your email right on the first page! Feel free to contact me directly as well with any questions or even just to chat! My info is on the website! 

 

Thank you Noah for sharing about your business and offering this incredible free software to my readers!

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