‍Heather Bayer: I'm truly delighted to have with me today Fred Bassili from Hostfully a fellow Canadian. We are recording this actually on July the fourth, and I was thinking, why is Fred not out celebrating July the fourth and then it just clicked? He's a Canadian, we did it three days ago on Canada Day.

So welcome, Fred. Happy Canada Day for three days ago.

Fred Bassili: Thank you so much. Happy Canada Day to you too. And happy 4th of July to our American friends.

Heather Bayer: Absolutely. Absolutely. I sent that message out to all my US friends this morning. I'm sure they're all off having barbecues and , hopefully they're not sitting in traffic or at airports, because I hear that's a little bit congested this morning. So we are gonna [00:01:00] talk about a lot of things, AI today, but firstly, tell us a little bit about your background and your role of Hostfully and what's a Canadian doing down there? Working for Hostfully?

Fred Bassili: Okay many years ago I ran a single condo as an STR or a short term rental. And this was before the age of all the property management software. And I think dynamic pricing was just starting. In retrospect, in the industry now and working for the marketing team and preparing a lot of content type. look back at what I was doing and it's almost cringe. But it was definitely a learning stage for me. And again, it was very rudimentary, but that's how I discovered Hostfully and started writing content for them, especially on the guest experience because they were mostly focused on guidebooks back then. one thing led to another and joined their marketing team. And here we are seven or eight years later. about AI and vacation [00:02:00] rentals and operations for larger companies and whatnot. So that single condo with iPhone four photos led to this moment, great to be here.

Heather Bayer : Whereabouts was the condo?

Fred Bassili: It was in Montreal so I guess it was successful. Mostly because the summertime in Montreal, it's like Formula One and the big festivals and all that. So to me, I didn't really need dynamic pricing or good revenue strategy 'cause the rates are always just sky high.

But I learned a lot nevertheless, and learned how difficult it is. Then when I learned that some people run 40 of these or 50, I just couldn't. I was a little busy and I just, I still can't believe some of the operations that I see out there now. And yeah, and also having worked for Homely for now as a contractor, but then an employee for, I've been involved in writing content for the industry for seven or eight years.

Just seeing the evolution as well of the degree of sophistication and some of the operations and how. advanced they are. [00:03:00] I'm sure you've seen the trends come and go in the industry. Really something else in the entrepreneurship that our customers show every day.

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Heather Bayer : What types of property managers do you tend to work mostly with? What size companies are there?

Fred Bassili: Yeah, so we pride ourselves at Hostfully at serving everyone. So we serve people with as small as three vacation rentals. Some of them are just like three high-end luxury rentals. Some of them are three or four up to enterprise. We have customers with a thousand plus properties. And our average, I would say is somewhere between 20 to a hundred. Because our platform can scale very well and you can assign roles and subdivide our teams and things like that. And, everything that supports growth in a company. Typically we see high growth customers, so people that come with a smart portfolio and then just really grow with the tools that we offer. Yeah, anywhere between 20 and a hundred is our typical customer.

Heather Bayer : Yeah and I love that size of company [00:04:00] because they, they tend to be into growth and scaling and they have quite often a lot of the issues that I think, in my year or so of diving into ai, they have those issues that I think AI can really. Help. So that's why we're having this conversation.

Really, it is about ai as anybody who's listened to the podcast for the last 10, 11 years knows that, I spent the first 10 years of it just talking about property management in general and I've just been shifting episode by episode into ai and I think now probably 80% of them are talking about AI because it's very topical right now. .

Going on from there, why do you think now is the right time to explore how AI is being used in the short term rental industry? 'cause we're gonna talk at the end of this, about the survey that that we are collaborating with you.

So why is this the right time?

Fred Bassili: Yeah. AI's been around for a long time. If you ask Price Labs and Wheelhouse and Beyond and the dynamic pricing folks, they are ripping their hair out. They're like we've been doing this for a long time. That was machine learning and it was very code heavy and it wasn't really accessible to the common person. then with the explosion of Open AI chat, GPT, which is a large language model, you can talk to the AI and ask it to do things. That's really what it was like the bridge head or like the entry of AI for the common person. And then. I think there's been a little bit of a disconnect, I think, with the content that's being put out the reality that people face in their business. Whereas a lot of people saw the first iterations of AI and ChatGPT and we're like, this is gonna change the world. Okay, great. And then we keep hearing it's gonna change business, gonna change business, but there's not really that many concrete applications. And you're like me and you've played with a lot of these different tools, a lot of them just aren't there [00:06:00] yet.

What I think is happening now, especially in 2025, is we're seeing content, like stuff that's being put out on social media papers or whatever, and it's like we're getting more practical. So I think the tone has shifted from. It's gonna change your life, it's gonna change your business or it's gonna destroy jobs

Whatever you wanna hear about I had this particular problem, this is what I did to use a, like that type of content is coming out. And that's really encouraging because I think especially in our industry. This is where we're gonna see the gains. And it's a little bit like the direct booking craze from a couple years ago everybody was like, you need a direct booking site.

Okay, I get it. But what do I do? Okay, now it's if you need to connect an API with your PMS, if you wanna have a custom site. So the tactical content or the things that people can bite on is starting to come out slowly. That's where we are now with AI in the industry.

Yeah. [00:07:00] I hear a lot of people diving in thinking, and I know I've done this, oh gosh, this is gonna be so easy. And actually, it's not that easy. I was just working on just a very simple, really simple automation this morning. My niece. In the US is campaigning to be a judge.

She's been a lawyer for many years. She now wants to be a judge. So she has to collect hundreds and hundreds of signatures.

And , it's all handwritten. They go down on forms, these signatures, and then they have to be put onto an Excel spreadsheet. So my sister is doing this for her daughter.

She's taking all these forms and she's manually reading through them and typing them up onto an Excel spreadsheet, and I said to her you don't have to do that. We can take that, we can take a scan of that form and then we can ask AI to create a spreadsheet.

But it's not that simple. You still have to use optical character recognition software to take the handwritten text and turn it into something that Excel can [00:08:00] uses. And then you have to have that little connection in the middle that takes it from that text into the Excel spreadsheet.

And that would be on Zapier if you like. From when you think, oh yeah, I can do that for me to the actual execution of it and having it work perfectly. That is not, it doesn't happen in minutes. It doesn't happen, it doesn't happen in the seconds like it does when you ask chat GPT to give you an answer for something.

And then you'll watch a YouTube video and it's been cut for 10 minutes , to maximize the engagement and then you go, oh, this is taking a bit more than 10 minutes for me to figure out, because your application is just slightly different and requires a little bit of tinkering.

 It’s not as easy as it looks

Heather Bayer: These things are doable. Completely doable, but it's, it I think it is put across as being way easier than it actually is. Oh, it's now called Agentic ai, because agents will come along and do all these different tasks for you at the push of a button, [00:09:00] but there's a lot more that goes on in the background beyond that coding, which.

The AI can pretty much do it for you now. But , to me it's put out as way more simplistic than it actually is. Tell me who's adopting AI currently. What about realtors?

Fred Bassili: Oh yeah, so just getting ready for this podcast, I was like , our industry's fairly small, the vacation rental and SDR managers, and there's only so much polling that happens. So if you look at the. Industries that are next to us, which is property management, the traditional long-term rentals or like just general real estate investors that have to go out and look for clients the same way we, we look for property owners. Like what are they doing? And they're much bigger, so there's much more data on them. It's actually interesting. And I think it, it's the same, it's the same sort of behavior and the same sort of thinking that we see in our industry. It's some, like the stat I read was 8% of real estate small businesses [00:10:00] have use AI on a regular basis,

Higher actually than the 4% for all types of small businesses in the US and Canada. It's interesting because then you look at the realtors and realtors are often in communication with people. And that's the current state, like that's the most ubiquitous type of AI, and 28% of them use AI in their day-to-day jobs. You can imagine a realtor automatically responding to an inquiry, at least with the first interaction with yeah, sure, I'm available, blah, blah.

Okay. So there's that kind of thing. And then. I spent a bit of time looking at the solutions for property management, the traditional long-term rental applications, and very much like the property management software for vacation rentals. Everyone now is building an AI component, I have the sense that custom AI solutions with automations and pulling your own data, people are still a little hesitant to get into because of the coding. And like you said in your example, which is collecting signatures, it's actually [00:11:00] a bit more complicated than it looks. But when presented with that tool , I can talk about some of the stats I collected from Hostfully. When it's built into the tools that they use every day, adoption goes up pretty high. So it's interesting to see you put something practical in front of someone, they wanna use it.

Heather Bayer: Let's talk about the tools that they are currently using. Mostly for revenue management operations, guest communication. And so many of the SaaS products now are integrating their AI components into what they've been doing for a long time. Are smaller property managers using these, because they don't come cheap, they don't come inexpensively and you start stacking up on the tech stack.

I looked at something that Brooke Pfautz had put out recently, asking people to describe their tech stacks. And some of them were just monstrous, and as a former property manager, I started adding up those monthly subscriptions. [00:12:00] It can go way out of whack for the smaller property managers who just don't have those budgets.

Fred Bassili: Yeah, so I think the average VRM when we ran our calculations spent something like between $40 and $75 per property a month, which is a good amount of money, but you were asking about the smaller operators. Let's just call them the 20 to hundred. So I went in and I looked at Hostfully.

We have an AI feature right now. It's called Inbox ai, which is guest messaging AI built into your unified inbox. And for the Hostfully users that also. subscribe to the guidebook service. It also considers what's in your guidebook to give a better answer, tailor to your property or whatever.

Your house manual is also taken into consideration. So if I look at the usage of inbox AI after three months after launch, almost a hundred percent of people were using this feature. And again, it's just a little hard getting the exact number, but it [00:13:00] was in the nineties 90 plus adoption rate for that particular feature. it is very popular when you put it in front of people and we make it free for our users. So it shows to me that people are willing to use these tools and they want to use these tools when they're in front of them. I think we have something, I could just put a message out there today. I know it's overwhelming and it's daunting to create your own custom solution for the problem that you have. Every customer I've spoken to for case studies or just general interviews to figure out how they use their software, everyone runs it a bit differently. So I think if I can just encourage people, it's to use their property management software's API, if they have access to it. And of a problem that pains you every day and then. With Heather's help and hopefully we can collaborate on some content. Let's show you how we can solve those problems. And then [00:14:00] you can look to, to help you with that final part. Like you were talking about that yeah, we need to code this.

It's not as simple as it looks. I, yeah, I think that's my message today. Don't just rely on what your PMS has to offer your dynamic pricing tool. You have specific problems or challenges in your day to day and. There you, which is the backend connector of your property management software.

Heather Bayer: Yeah, and I know from my experience of running a property management company and using property management software that we never really explored, that we never explored a lot of what the pro PMS had to offer. And I think a lot of people don't do that. They think it's simply to ensure that the person who's making a booking gets that booking confirmation minutes after they upload their credit card.

And I know that all these software companies have so much more to offer than is probably being used. .

Fred Bassili: And again, for folks that [00:15:00] might not be familiar with the word API API, basically it's a way for different software to talk to each other. And they're open in the backend. So if you think of when you receive a reservation from Airbnb, that is coded in a specific way. gets sent to PMS, then takes that and that's the whole and converts language it uses for its software, but that connection is there. You can create things that happen in between there for your own benefit. And I'd like to talk about examples later on in our conversation, Heather, because I think that's when it's going to click for some people as to what you can do, not only with the API, but also with an AI agent on top of that.

Heather Bayer: I had API explain to me a while back in a way that really resonated with me. And the explanation was normally if you go to a nice restaurant, you'll walk in the front door. Everything's laid out for you. You sit down, you get the [00:16:00] menu, the meal served to you, you pay for it, and you walk out and you've had a great meal.

But an API is when you can actually go around to the back door of the restaurant.

You can go into the kitchen and you can use all their facilities to create a great meal. And that really made sense to me. And the analogy went on actually about, having different ingredients and how you could find them and having people there to help you to cook your own meal in the way that you actually wanted it.

Fred Bassili: Yeah it's basically when you start thinking of the API and you have access to it. You have access to everything that the PMS collects and you can use all that information. You just need to find a way to connect it to what you want it to do whether that's filling out a spreadsheet or talking to an AI pinging your Slack channel if you get a new reservation, for example.

So all that stems from the API to create those custom solutions.

Heather Bayer: And we will, we'll come [00:17:00] back to that in a minute when we talk about some use cases. For those concerned. And there are a lot of people concerned 'cause I'm seeing all these messages out there on LinkedIn at the moment, about automation replacing the human touch.

And certainly for the listeners to this podcast, I've spent the last 11 years talking about the human touch

In the short term rental business. What are your thoughts on balancing AI with hospitality? What uses does AI have that doesn't preclude human intervention?

Fred Bassili: Yeah. If we talk about the human touch, that's really on the guest side. And that's one aspect of your business where AI can help. But I just want to address that concern right away. that the best approach is definitely the semi-automatic approach. So the AI helps you find the information, communicate with the guest, prepare the answer, and if you're happy with it, you just hit send. It sounds like a [00:18:00] small thing, but it actually saves you a lot of time. So there's always that human in the loop. But then if we think broader picture what I've, been proposing this conversation was solving your day-to-day challenges with ai, and is maybe somewhere where it's easy to lose empathy for the guest because it's been a problem for you for so long if you start getting familiar with these solutions and all that, and you design a solution, it's almost like a sledgehammer. And , because you've lost empathy for that problem, like how many times do I have to answer? Like, how does the air conditioner work? Oh my God. I'm just gonna, hit this with everything I've got and develop a solution for it. So this is where I think, having an AI champion in your business, someone that can take on that role that it's not the person that's living the pain point that's put in the solution, [00:19:00] it's the AI champion. So in the case of the annoying air conditioner question that you get six times a week, throughout your rentals, it's not just like AI looks for that keyword and then puts out like the answer. It's like the AI is also trained to end with, why don't you try that and let me know how that works out.

I'll be here for you. So that's the human touch. But if you were the one that was like living that problem, you might not think of adding that little final touch at the end. So if I can make another recommendation, if you have a company of a certain scale with so many employees, it's good to have external people help figure out the solutions. That way they don't come off as too robotic or too cold, and you maintain that human touch. , And that's only for the guest facing side. But let's forget that hospitality businesses have so many more things under their umbrella. [00:20:00] like predictive maintenance, there's the market comparison and analytics, so there's like all those things where AI can come in. And the owner management is something else, but those are all applications where AI can take the workload off of your team and help free up their time.

Heather Bayer: Okay, so let's move into some use cases, some really practical ways that AI can save time. It can be saved. On repetitive tasks. And once again, my experience and yours probably of managing your own property, you know that those things that you do over and over again and, it almost becomes like muscle memory and you just do them.

But when you start adding up the time taken on those tasks, it's time that can be really used somewhere else. So that's where AI comes in. Let's talk about some use cases then.

Fred Bassili: Sure. The one I was experimenting with, and I really like this because. I think it scales people with, 20 [00:21:00] plus, 50 plus properties will, might see the value in this, but your review management. Average property gets booked four to six times a month. Let's say you've got 20 half of them send a review, that's 40 reviews that come in written format or in star form or however you collect them, every month.

And then you have to read them. And that's throughout your day or throughout your week. Sometimes they come at a weird time, you're not always able to dedicate the attention or you read it, it's good enough, you move on, but you don't see the global trend. If you wanna see the global trend, it's you having to open Airbnb, VRBO, your direct booking or whatever survey you used to collect like that review from the direct bookings that you collate all that information and hopefully get an insight from it. Because that can show like a long-term trend or a decline in your reviews. This is where an AI comes in, and this is maybe the more practical approach. So [00:22:00] if you have a PMS like Hostfully where the API is accessible, the automation or the workflow can pull those reviews. Okay. You export them into a Google sheet, and from there you can use an AI to read each individual response and flag. Was this review positive or negative? Or you could teach it like you would a virtual assistant. this type of wording or this type of thing comes around, I want you to notify me right away. so right then in the spreadsheet, it creates a one or a zero based on what it believes the action needs to be. Let's say the one is, it needs an action. Your automation then takes that and exports a message to a dedicated Slack channel. So right there you get an alert. So that's the basic thing we do with that. And then what you can do is per property, you can ask [00:23:00] the ai, and this is more of a manual thing I would do, but you can take all those that are timestamped because it comes timestamped from your PMS. you can run a long-term analysis and you could say, Hey, for all my 50 properties, run a long-term analysis for all of them over the last six months. Okay, now 49 are doing a good thing, but one property, it's like it always comes down. It's showing that it's getting a little wear and tear, right? You'll get stuff like it's seen better days or this didn't work all that well, so now we need to have that conversation with that owner, but that AI was able to do all that reading and all that digesting of all that data. Maybe three seconds. And how long would've taken you to do that on your own to read all that? That's to me where when you get that alert from your ai, you don't just create an [00:24:00] email that notifies the property owner of Hey we're detecting..... no, take the time, validate the information.

Think of your strategy and how you're gonna address that. Again, the human touch and hospitality. So always try and have a human in the loop but that one workflow I described, API, pulling your reviews, Google Sheet AI analyzes the Google sheet. How many hours can that save you every quarter? So put that into perspective and these are the kind of flows that the bigger you scale, the more time you're gonna save.

Heather Bayer: Absolutely. It was probably about six months ago I think I went to, oh actually it was before, it was back in 2024. And I went to a conference and somebody was talking about ai and they just were telling us. This thing about reviews. Analyze your reviews and you can analyze for sentiment, ,

are people, how many people are angry or really satisfied and love the place.

'cause you want that as well. [00:25:00] You want to know, you want to know what people love about somewhere so that you can apply that same sort of satisfaction sentiment to other properties. I absolutely loved that there was this available, and if a lot of people are saying that then, and it's not huge, you could probably apply that to other properties.

So that's just one, that's just one odd thought I had about that. But I was pretty blown away when they started talking about what you could do with reviews and it's massive. These are people who have taken the time to write a review and often they're writing really great reviews and in those reviews are things that perhaps you could miss if you were just doing a manual glance over them.

Fred Bassili: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Or you get that one email in your inbox from Airbnb, your property was reviewed, you read it, you move on, but you're not thinking of the trend long term. Or maybe you are. But the AI is just doing it for you.

Same thing with some owner [00:26:00] reports. You can use an AI to identify did something drastic change in the last couple of weeks since the last owner report was generated? It could just show you that you've gotta find an accounting error somewhere so you're not just like sending that out. It's kinda like your backup that you can implement in your workflow.

Heather Bayer : I, I wanted to share one that would've been hugely helpful to me. As a property manager, and we were always working on the presentation that we wanted to , do a great presentation for our new owners,

Because we knew our competitors weren't doing this. They still had single page PDFs or they just relied on something that was on the website that said exactly the same thing as everybody else.

We do great marketing. You know the type of single page but we did work at creating a really nice presentation that as soon as we had an owner inquiry, we could go back with this presentation. , And I took hours over this and now there are [00:27:00] platforms like Gamma ai that can create a wonderful presentation in a very short time. Create a professional pitch deck if you like. So you leverage those AI powered design tools. You can customize them with the property specific details.

That is the really great thing because you can have a standard presentation and then you get an inquiry and you can go take a look at the house and you can immediately update that pitch deck to be personalized for that property.

And I just love that idea. It creates it faster. It comes out as really professional. I don't know what the conversion rates are, but I can imagine they're pretty high because I know what my potential owners were looking for in a company.

They were looking for this professionalism and they were looking for personalization. And then of course you have consistent branding across the presentations. AI doesn't have to be somebody going out and creating a [00:28:00] program for you. It can be something very simple that you use and gamma AI is free for most cases, that anybody would want unless you're going into mega presentations.

Fred Bassili: Yeah. And if, just to go back to your question about the human touch and hospitality, the owner side of hospitality. If you think of how long it took you to create a deck, the old way, which was a generic deck with no personalization, actually , what you're describing has more personalization. So you know you're gonna have a human review it at the end, but now you've got a photo of the property in there. The property owner's name. If you create another workflow that pulls from like Key Data or a DNA and you do a little bit of marketing analysis of what they could be earning, not just a generic in this neighborhood, you can run, you could get this much ADR no, it's like this particular property, we could get this much going with it.

And you could probably scale that presentation or that deck [00:29:00] to. Most of the homeowners in that neighborhood, if you know that most of 'em are second homeowners and they're all personal. So again, now we're actually using AI to add a human touch to the processes.

Heather Bayer: Yeah. And the opportunities for that are endless. I think to create that personalized content and everybody wants to go out and gather in more owners, and when an owner is out there looking at different property management companies, they get a little bit overwhelmed by

everybody offering exactly the same thing. By doing this, you're offering something really different.

Fred Bassili: Absolutely. I agree.

Heather Bayer: Okay let's try for, let's do another use case. One of the reasons we're doing this is because when we go in a second to talk about the survey, one of the things that we are giving away when you respond to that survey that we're gonna be talking about is 24 AI powered solutions.

So we're going to share all these solutions with you simply [00:30:00] for filling in our survey. But let's do another couple of use cases just to just to give some more examples. Social media scheduling. Here's another one. You do marketing. How useful is AI for social media scheduling?

Fred Bassili: We have to be a little bit careful with AI and social media, it's great at creating content and scale. . When you get into the creative element like social media and finding original content, and this is more like a semi-manual thing, so I'm not saying it's gonna automate absolutely everything you do, but you can come up with the idea of a post and have whatever AI tool you're using chat, GPT, or perplexity or whatever you want to use. Say, okay, why don't you come out with five variations of this with different angles. This is what I wanna achieve with the social media post. So you were stuck in a rut, your creative muse was not working that day. of a sudden now you've got five options that you can look at and it would've taken you hours to [00:31:00] break through that writer's book. Then similarly, once you find that groove and you've put out a post and it's worked for you, why not repeat a variation of that post every quarter because you've had high engagement and you've had high clicks. So now you can ask the ai. Without diverging too far from this, and you can work on a prompt and it's doable but you could say, why don't you create four more variations of this? And so now your social media feed is not so repetitive. Like you're not just reusing the same social media content. It's slightly different. And again, you can experiment with the AI tool. And then if you want to work at scale. That's when there's guides out there specifically for property managers for creating social media posts at scale. But , if you give it the right guidelines, it will put out stuff that's fairly decent. And again, this, my warning for small business operators [00:32:00] always have a human in the loop. I tested an ad creative tool for paying ads. When you look at it quickly, the output's okay, but it's 90% there.

This is your business. You've taken a long time to build it. Part of you is in that business. Don't just let an AI take it over or an element of your business. Just take a minute, maybe come back to it and verify everything that's been created, and if you need to just add your personal touch to it that's where the time savings are. You're not working on the bulk of social media content. You're just working on making it Heather's posts, and Heather's touch on the social media posts, and that's a big time saver.

Heather Bayer: Yeah, exactly. Let's talk about the survey and I'll give our listeners a bit of background to this. So we here at Vacation Rental Formula Business School have created a program called the AI Ambassador Program [00:33:00] because we feel that every company, whether it's small or large, needs somebody within it to bang the AI drum in a very consistent way and with a hospitality focus. So it's not everybody in a company working on their own little. Chat, GPT or perplexity or Claude, which everyone, likes to use, but there is one person who can share what best practices are, who ensures consistency across the board, that everybody's using the same branding and doing things in the same way, but also is able to identify where these use cases can be put into practice.

So we are building out this program but we figured that before this happened, we wanted to find out where everybody was on the AI spectrum. How much you're using it, what you think about it, what do you think you can use it for? Have you identified your own use cases?

So we [00:34:00] went out and asked Hostfully if they'd be interested in collaborating with us on this because they have the most amazing record of producing wonderful surveys and reports. And also we just love Hostfully and we've been working with them over a period of years on a lot of different things and they've sponsored the podcast and we just love you guys. So we are just so pleased that you've came back and said, yes, you were enthusiastic. Why? Why were you enthusiastic about it?

Fred Bassili: To be honest, we had this conversation about AI content out there. Then you said something that really hit me. 'cause I was telling you about my frustration, at least in the marketing world of everyone's saying , AI is going to change marketing . And you always hear the same line and it's just, I. I hope the beginning of the conversation we were having today was very general, but I hope we at least showed some tactics that are practical. I was complaining to you and I was like, I don't understand how we're supposed to like, get excited about AI [00:35:00] no one is actually showing how it's supposed to be used. And then you were like no you're thinking about it wrong. That's the tactic. The logistics is like, who in the company is responsible for ai? What are your budgets and what are the personality traits that we need? This person or this group of people building AI tools. We're not talking about the tactics, we're talking about the logistics.

And if you have your logistics right, and it's the same thing in your vacation rental business. It's like I can talk about what sponge to use for the cleaner, but no. What, where? That's the important part. You blew my mind away when you just completely changed how I thought about it. I was like Heather gets it. So let's partner up because this is gonna be good. We're gonna get good questions out there. And I'm just really fascinated to see. As a marketing person, how people are using AI and again, where are their pain points? And for us it's about helping the industry.

We put out the big industry report every year on trends in the [00:36:00] industry. But this specific AI one, I think a lot of people have a lot of questions. The same issue that I described about just not really seeing anything concrete out there. and I hope that with this survey we can at least demystify or at least help people benchmark where they are with regards to their peers in the industry.

So I'm really excited to get this out.

Heather Bayer): Yeah. And you said, we saw the same problem, but we came at it from different perspectives. But I think we come together on the fact that there's a lot of AI hype out there.

Fred Bassili: Yeah,

Heather Bayer (2): doesn't always match up with what the reality is. And it, people are confused and there is anxiety about there, and I've said it before, I, people are going, they've got hands over their ears and going la.

Ai, we, we really don't want to, let's put our heads in the sand and not listen to this. And maybe it'll go away, but we know it's not going away. And. So with this survey, this is a report that really shows where we are in the industry in terms of [00:37:00] AI adoption, how is it being adopted so that we can then take the business forward with some real solutions.

Fred Bassili: Yeah, agreed. so it's a fairly short survey. Heather and I worked, we had a million questions, so we had to cut quite a bit of them, but we've tried to make it very digestible for people. I know you're all busy and it's the summer season, but the survey takes about five to seven minutes to fill out. Um, you can find it. We create a short address for it, so it's hostfully.com/survey and that'll take you right to the survey and hopefully if you can fill it out it takes five to seven minutes. We're gonna choose at the end of July when we're gonna wrap up the survey with one winner for a free iPad.

So we're gonna just choose a random survey participant. And Heather, I think you've been working on something as well [00:38:00] that you'll be releasing to the survey participants in general.

Heather Bayer: It's for anyone who completes a survey they will get our it, it star started out as a two page PDF. It turned out to 45 pages of use cases. What we wanted to do was to really open your eyes to what those opportunities are, but to be very specific and focused on them so that you can look at these use cases and go, oh gosh, yes, we could use this. And then we will then take, from there, if you find a use case, you can come back to us and we can give you some help on how you could go forward and put those use cases into practice. So everybody that fills in the survey will get a copy of this ebook.

And so once we've done it. Fred, what happens once everybody's filled in? What happens after that? What is the output of all these responses we're going to get?

Fred Bassili: Yeah, that's where the magic happens. So I go into hermit mode. I look at [00:39:00] the data and I try and find the trends and prepare the charts and come up with the. Analysis, and of course, Heather's team is going to be involved in, working on that analysis just because of her experience with property management.

We prepare that big analysis, we put it in a digestible report, and then we make it public. So anyone that fills out the survey, we're also going to send you that report. You won't have to like, fill in a form or anything. We'll just send it directly to your inbox so you won't have to be reminded of that. And then we'll also make it available on our site in the resources and report page. If you lost the email containing the report, you'll be able to access that 24-7 from then on. So, go to hostfully.com, and then you navigate to the resource and report. But that should be so we'll be collecting responses in July. If you want, fill it out now, if you're busy fill it out later hostfully.com/survey is the address, so we'll be collecting July. [00:40:00] We'll be spending August preparing the report and then hopefully by September we have something we can share with the industry.

Heather Bayer : Yeah. And I devour the, in your, the Hostfully industry report every year. And it's been, how many years has that been going for now?

Fred Bassili: Seven or eight.

Heather Bayer: It has been a long time and every year that's come out it's fed the podcast for the next few months as I take some of those results.

The results from these surveys are the distillation of the industry of what people out there are actually experiencing and sharing. So it's really important. I do hope you will go to hostfully.com/survey and fill this survey in.

As I said, you'll get the copy of the ebook and go into the draw for the iPad as well. Fred, it's been a [00:41:00] fantastic conversation. I've really enjoyed this. We are gonna have lots more conversations over the next few weeks. We will come back when the report is issued and actually go through the findings and, and share those on the podcast as well. So we will have that discussion later on. Is there anything else you want to add to this?

Fred Bassili: Not really. I know it's daunting for everyone, these new tools, and it's a big change in how we're supposed to run our businesses. I feel it on the marketing side as well. Experiment! You're all entrepreneurs. And you know what got you here is that you're able to learn new things and try, I know it comes with coding and things like that and it's daunting, but the effort is worth it. Once you've gotten hooked on one AI solution, you'll wanna build out so many more. so please don't be scared. I know it's easy for me to say I'm not in your shoes and I don't have your day to day obligations, but it's worth it. And, hopefully with the [00:42:00] survey that we put out and the responses we get, help Demystify and I know Heather's working on really good stuff helps people overcome that first hurdle. So thank you so much for having me on your short today, Heather. I really appreciate it.

Heather Bayer: It's been an absolute pleasure and we will talk again soon. Thank you, Fred.