• Who is the driving force behind GuestReady?
“GuestReady was founded by myself, Patrick (CFO) and a team of local co-founders in each of our current cities. As frequent travellers and Airbnb hosts ourselves, we faced the challenges that come with hosting on Airbnb first-hand. With rising guest expectations this can become a time-consuming and costly affair. We set out to take the hassle out of hosting by providing hotel-worthy services for both our hosts and guests from around the world. Our mission is to help hosts unlock the full value of their property.”
• How many apartments do you manage and where are they?
“We currently manage more than 550 units in London, Paris, Hong Kong and Singapore, and this number is growing steadily every week.”
• Describe your product and service?
“GuestReady started off as an Airbnb management company in London, Paris, Singapore and Hong Kong to assist individual Airbnb hosts with their operations, taking care of everything from listing creation to key management and cleaning. However, we saw a need for similar solutions in the B2B space after continuously receiving inquiries from property investors and hospitality companies. So nowadays, we are also providing a full range of hospitality and property management services for serviced apartments, small hospitality businesses and other types of short time property rentals. In addition to that, our R&D team is working on various tech solutions to streamline the complete rental and property management process, so that we are able to scale our operations without losing our personal touch.”
• Who is your target audience?
“Property management solutions are needed in various industries, so our target audience is fairly broad. On the supply side, we work with Airbnb hosts, landlords and property businesses with access to apartments in our key locations. Apartments in our portfolio range from cozy pied-a-terres to luxury penthouses in some of our cities’ prime locations. The biggest part of our portfolio consists of premium apartments, so we tend to attract guests that have relatively higher incomes. We see strong demand from families or groups of friends and are also seeing an increase in business travellers choosing Airbnb apartments over traditional hotels.”
• How is GuestReady looking to grow?
“The benefits of being a startup business is that we can be flexible in different ways. We already extended our offering from providing solutions purely to Airbnb hosts, to offering services to new types of clients such as property investors and boutique hospitality businesses, who we support with both online and offline operations. We keep an open mind, and the more we venture into the B2B space, the more untapped opportunities we discover in this space.”
• What is the outlook for the short term rental management services?
“The short-term rental management market is changing rapidly thanks to changing notions of home ownership and an increase in a location-independent workforce. Increasingly, people are no longer stationed in a single city, but are more and more enabled to travel to different cities across the world, be it on a project basis, work assignment or for a temporary move. This increases the demand for short-term accommodations, as the traditional minimum rental period of one year simply doesn’t apply in many of these situations. This also increases the supply of ’empty’ apartments, as people are on the road for longer periods of time. With the sharing economy becoming more commonplace, short-term rental platforms like Airbnb are seen as a fitting and accessible solution to make most out of these situations. Living and working are becoming more mobile and flexible, and housing solutions should adapt to that.”</p
