There are people that just have it, and David Krauss, Co-Founder & CEO at Rent Responsibly is definitely one of those individuals. From awarding-winning Airbnb SuperHost to feeling like the worst host ever, David came up with an idea that changed the short-term rental space forever… and now he is doing it again. A transition from vacation rental host to Co-Founding NoiseAware, and now 18 months into empowering and enlightening all “sides” of the vacation rental regulatory “fight” with Rent Responsibly!  David, Alexa Nota, and their amazingly talented team are education, a voice, and a sounding board for the industry that is welcomed and necessary. A wonderful conversation with a man that throws himself to the sidelines of conflict and by listening helps navigate situations to calmer waters. You’ll be surprised to learn that looking 5 or 10 years into the future is easier to predict outcomes than looking at 6 months to a year.  The No BS Short Term Rental Podcast brings the right people to the table at the right time giving their audience an inside view and real take on the industry like no other. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Listening To Find Solutions With Featured Guest David Krauss

This is episode eighteen. We got my boy. I’m super hype. This is going to be fun.

I’m excited. How was your weekend?

My weekend was fantastic as what a weekend should be, low key, errands got to run and stuff was taken. It’s never a dull moment with the hotel and other things. Things always pop up but I’m blessed with love and hospitality.

I was on day 16 or 17 working on my kitchen.

It isn’t done yet?

Don’t even get me started. Countertops are in though.

This is an adult moment from Mateo Adult weekend. John’s doing home rental. That is some adult stuff. Eighteen is when you officially become an adult.

Guns are up for that. That’s why I’m happy to have you.

It becomes legal. We’re a legal show now.

Adulting podcast.

If someone has jumped in here and you don’t necessarily know who this is, I’ll go ahead and let Mateo introduce but yes, we already have eighteen episodes.

Fifteen hundred downloads.

We’re getting there.

Dave’s going to take us to 2,000 so that’s fitting for my friend. I just gave it away. We have the one and only Sir David Krauss of Rent Responsibly, an industry icon, as I like to call him. He would never say that but I say he is. He is a good bud and friend of mine. He is essential to this industry. We will dig into his story and background. I’m not going to go along here because I want him to tell it himself. Welcome, David. Thanks for coming on. It’s pleasure to have you.

Thank you so much for having me, Mateo and John. I have been reading this show and caught an episode on my little joggy jog and I’m pumped. Who doesn’t want to share what inspires them and keeps them going every day in this space? There are so many people out here like us. I’m sure many of them read this show and are at the front end of this industry. We are young in this space and a lot of us are trying to improve it in a variety of ways. You guys, too. That’s what this show is about, spreading the message and telling stories.

Thank you. We appreciate having you on. Let’s dig into it. I want to get into why it’s important we have you on here. Dave, let’s start at the beginning. How did you get into this space? How did you arrive here? You’re from the Northeast. You and my best friend in the world are from the same town so it’s no wonder we get along. Shout-out to Brookline. Get into it. Tell us your story.

My nickname in college became Boston Dave. If you’ve ever seen the movie Blow, Boston George was super popular. The movie was right when I entered college and so I adopted the moniker. It turns out I’m from Brookline. Maybe my entire life’s been some Imposter syndrome because it was the other side. It was two blocks away from the line. I got to dot my I’s.

That’s how you’re on my phone, Boston Dave.

It lives, unfortunately.

It will. I love it. It’s authentic. You got that.

The question is, how did I get into this space? I look back on that and I felt like I was running away from a full-time job when I became an entrepreneur, which was about 3 years before I hosted my 1st guest. When I was 27, I was working at a commercial real estate property management firm and this paycheck job wasn’t lighting me on fire every day.

My passion was coming out in a charity work that I was doing. I was Chairman, Founder and President of Boredom Busters, a charity that created this win-win-win where we would throw these pretty gangster badass parties and people would come. It was a live band, a photo booth, past apps and a silent auction. We had performers on stage. It was not your average twenty-year-old charity party.

The cool thing was after that, we got to go deliver the proceeds to Boston Medical Center, the safety net hospital in Boston. Their budget for toys and games had been depleted post-pandemic. We started in 2010. We donated once thinking that was what we were going to do once. Seven years later, we realized we were the only toys and games budget.

What I’m trying to say is I was finding these win-win-wins in my life, whether it was social or professional. We’re going to go out and have a good time. We have a good time and then the proceeds and donations are great. The charity was awesome to run but then also the ultimate recipients of the benefits were these patients. About 10,000 patients a year were benefiting from our programs.

With that, I was like, “How do I find in my career, something that makes me feel this way where there’s this win-win-win?” I had an apartment in Boston when I was chasing my wife. The classic Boston thing is to leave Boston chasing a lady like in the Good Will Hunting story. I had to see that girl in Texas. To make that move, I needed to support an apartment in Boston for a month, drive down there and then rolled the apartment off. I discovered short-term rentals that way. It was either Craigslist or this new thing Airbnb in 2013. Here lies the first win-win-win.

I was able to cover my rent and provide somebody with an amazing experience. It was right over Christmas. I was doing the research before this. I put a Christmas tree in the house for this French family so they could have an American Christmas. I don’t think they do trees over there so I put the whole tree and everything in there. They invited me to stay with them in France because they loved it so much and we may have built this friendship around that. This is such a win-win-win. I paid my rent.

Did you get the girl?

She is now my wife. Her name is Courtney. Another win-win-win. I took a chance.

Unless you’re not a Patriots fan, then that’s not necessary. If she makes my boy beam into the moon as he does, I’m good with it. If he’s good, I’m good. My bias is the selfish side.

Sorry if I’m being long-winded.

No, you’re doing exactly what we want. This is your story here.

I tap back into this 2013 moment when I was thinking about this coming on. I remember those days so well and the feeling of finding something, it’s like that third win, which is so cool. Somebody else benefits from something that makes sense to me. That ultimately is a thread that’s throughput for all the things that I’ve done since. Starting in 2013, I’ve retired from hosting because my other hustles have turned into passionate projects that turned into companies for me. I’ve hosted 6,000 people and 1,500 reservations. I’ve won an award. This is a humble brag but I guess I can do that.

If you don’t do it, I’m bringing it out. You might as well just tell it. I’ll pull it out of the bag. I’m not letting you get away with that.

I won the most absurd award from Airbnb as a top 100 host in the world for winning Superhost 24 quarters in a row. I realized the only thing you had to do is not cancel. I wouldn’t let anybody down. I’d put them up in hotels and do whatever it took to keep people happy if things went wrong.

How many properties did you have at your peak? How many units were you renting at your peak?

Not many. 3 at 1 time because my neighbor wanted me to manage her place when she moved to Mexico. I had a townhouse and then my own ADU or garage apartment. It was 10 over 7 years so 10 different ones, 3 was the max but I was running NoiseAware for most of that time. It was a side hustle that turned into an R&D. Everything has this win-win-win. It’s hard to tell the story because there are a lot of overlapping circles. I consider myself a host at heart. It was that first time satisfying and then overachieving as a host.

To speed up the story a little bit, it all came crashing down in 2014 when somebody threw a pretty devastating party at one of my rentals. The devastating part of that was it destroyed my reputation with my neighbors. I was so embarrassed that I was the one who had created that crappy weekend for everybody. I looked online and somebody had ranted and said they were going to have a quiet weekend but they didn’t.

I found out in the worst way from the authorities that something had gone wrong. I had fourteen noise complaints from neighbors. I took it upon myself and said, “I can’t let that happen ever again.” I looked for a solution. Big donut hole in the universe. There was nothing that was privacy safe and could monitor noise. I found somebody, the CEO of NoiseAware Andrew Schulz, a genius electrical engineer.

Shout-out to Andrew, Stu, Mike and the whole team.

Patrick, Rob and all the tech guys who kicked me out of their office and said, “Dave, you can’t help us. Get out of here.” I found some people to help me solve that problem. We created NoiseAware, which is privacy-safe noise monitoring for short-term rentals. That was this ultimate win-win-win. If you create this solution, you put it in and help guests stay out of getting themselves into trouble. Most people don’t want or even know they’re bothering other people with their noise. It’s the nature of the beast sometimes.

David, to pause on the story, for those that are reading, because we get people from all over, can you give a super quick brief synopsis of what NoiseAware is to those that do not know?

NoiseAware is a privacy-safe noise monitoring service for short-term rental owners and operators. To simply put, it’s the smoke detector for noise. If you want to know too loud at your short-term rental or any property remotely and get notified in an automated fashion or even close the loop and have the night agent resolve it for you, that’s what NoiseAware does.

Dave, one of the things I want to have you dig into a little more because this is what we want and this is the story most people don’t understand, is you paid a heavy cost for the party. It wasn’t just something like someone threw a party, you got scolded and got to push on. You’ve developed this out of experiential learning for real. You got a heavy cost for those parties. A lot of people don’t necessarily see the reel in that bite, the reel on the other side of that if you don’t do this thing right.

There’s a heavy cost to those who find themselves on the other end of that. You are a great manager. I don’t want to skim over that either. Twenty-four quarters as a Superhost in that space, you can say it’s easy but it’s not. Someone that manages, I know that takes time, effort and energy. That’s important to contrast this story. You weren’t just someone that was side-hustling this and not paying attention. You put thought, care and what we would like our hosts to be in this space. It still went wrong on you. Talk about that. Did that drive you even further into that next phase?

I appreciate the kind words. Ultimately, the nature of almost everybody you meet in the space is people figure it out for themselves and make it work for themselves. Everybody writes the playbook and manual as things come up and they create it. Ultimately, what people want to get into it and start doing is if you can do it once, maybe twice, you start maybe liberating yourself from a job you don’t like and then you’re running a small business but you charted your path to get there. There is no short-term rental major at a university where you come out and you’re like, “I’m ready for this. I took all the classes.”

That’s what we need to keep in mind. 5 to 10 years from 2021, I can almost guarantee there will be. It’s not impossible. People overestimate what you can do in one year. People underestimate what you can do in three years. It’s impossible to predict what you can do in five years. In five years, all these things, you’re like, “No way.” They will happen.

The nature of this space is that it’s rapidly evolving in solutions. NoiseAware was five years old in 2021. In 2015, there wasn’t even a noise monitoring system or service. In 2021, there are multiple. They’re starter kit-level stuff. Most people have them. Back to the point of the care and the responsibility that you take on when you get into this space, most people who do show up every day.

A lot of people have the “I scrub the toilets too” history. Also, “I’m no different. I did the first cleaning myself because honestly, I didn’t trust anybody else to get every last little speck of dirt or hair off the floor, whatever it was.” You start trusting people and building a system around it. What I do with Rent Responsibly is try to accelerate that curve where people get to that level of standard, professionalism, compliance and understanding of what it means to be a responsible short-term owner, host or manager, as quickly as humanly possible and mass too, as an industry. It’s a win-win-win. You tap your passion to try to create as many beneficiaries as possible. That’s what the short-term rental space by nature does.

We’re providing people with the best experience and the best week of their life. We’re benefiting and able to produce value for ourselves in terms of employment. The missing piece that we are going to evolve into if Rent Responsibly is any successful, is the broader community, being able to understand what we do through the stories that we have and then also share in that benefit in a variety of ways. We can talk about that a little bit. I see that happening in pockets and we’re trying to ensure that it happens as a core piece of every short-term rental operation, that 3rd, 4th, 5th win-win-win down to the neighbor, local government and local economy. A lot of it is happening but it needs to happen more.

How long has Rent Responsibly been officially a thing?

About a year and a half in 2021.

You’re making amazing strides. I love seeing everything you’re all doing. You’re snagging up some great talent in the industry as well. I love the team you’re building. Initially, it started and was built to help professionalize or give tools to those that are operating the space to professionalize how they do things. Do you think that it is evolved into a 50/50 as partial advocacy as well then? Has it already evolved a little bit from initially what you were coming in set out to do and you’ve realized that there’s a potentially broader scope?

Anything young changes a lot. We do a lot of listening. One thing that you have to do is listen to what people want and need and the rule of three. When you hear something three times, it starts to be a pattern. We’ve followed that a lot. That’s how we’ve gotten into doing what we do. As an overview, it’s a mission-driven startup that is focused on building a sustainable future for short-term rentals in every community. The way we do that is to support local leaders and local communities on a web-based platform and use the people in our team who are all mostly experienced short-term rental local alliance leaders, myself included. I started the Dallas Short-Term Rental Alliance in 2020.

Ultimately, you try to build sustainability into these local alliances and local communities by making the work that they do. Almost everybody is a volunteer trying to build these communities. You take the back office work away from them and that’s a simple organization around facilitating Zoom webinars, education sessions, building worksheets, how you get registered and compliant, how you improve your neighborly practices and how you get the right tools.

Those are all pretty universal. A lot of that stuff, except for the local rules, everybody needs the same things so we’re trying to scale local community support. We have a lot of partners that believe in the mission. We’re doing it ourselves in different ways beforehand. We’re creating this broader short-term rental community by sewing together a lot of local short-term rental communities.

Do you feel, David, that Rent Responsibly could also be a resource for those in a community that is against short-term rentals? How do you educate steadfast communities, this is gentrification, this is ABC, all these things that are negatively impacting our community with eating up all the housing, all this stuff? Is there a way or a resource that we could direct to look at it from both sides? Do you see that as part of what you’re trying to do? Are you more focused just on the operator side?

The first thing to understand is the short-term rental stakeholder community is not just owners, hosts and managers. It is the small businesses that cater and provide services and benefit from the travel ecosystem. You have your housekeepers, handymen and women and technicians all the way through to the local coffee shop. The interesting thing too is short-term rentals usually come into play when you have these compression weekends and there’s not enough housing for big conventions and things like that. There are a lot of these reliant relationships and we look at them all as a whole, no different.

Everybody in the local alliances that we support, many of them aren’t owners, hosts and managers. They’re the aforementioned ancillary businesses. We’re a mission-driven startup and our mission is to build sustainability into every short-term rental community. The way I believe that that has to be done is through the broader community. People who don’t feel they’re a direct stakeholder or participant in the short-term rental activity have to be like, “I’m glad that we have this awesome short-term rental community in our town.” The fallacy is that most people assume that they want to travel and stay in short-term rentals but don’t want to live next to one. That’s only because you’ve maybe heard about the short-term rentals that aren’t great to live next to.

Two percent of short-term rentals cause the vast majority of nuisance issues. Local governments are trying to figure out how you manage this 2% of properties that are causing problems to ensure that 98% of other people in short-term rentals can exist and continue because so many people want to stay in short-term rentals, especially through the pandemic. Providing housing to frontline workers was one of the biggest eye-opening experiences in my life when everybody’s calendars got wiped in March 2020. It got filled in with people who otherwise would have nowhere to stay. Hotels were shut down and also the common space. The value that we’re starting to uncover is unbelievable.

Back to the mission-driven nature is the broader community’s acceptance and harmony with short-term rentals. I put that in that 5 to 10-year bucket where we can’t imagine exactly what that looks like but we’re already underestimating how incredible that will be. A lot of people want it in the 1-year section where you overestimate the change you can make in 1 year. It is a long process.

It comes from having those very difficult conversations but also it’s something Dave said too and I’ve witnessed this having worked with Rent Responsibly here in Atlanta and other places. When you listen, you get a better understanding of what needs to be addressed and what can be addressed with data and testimonies. Gentrification, housing and all of these things get co-mingled into, “Airbnb short-term rentals are bad,” along with the narrative of, “Everyone’s a party house and I don’t want this in my neighborhood.” The importance of having those conversations, dispelling those myths and bringing the testimony of this is a way for someone in a gentrified neighborhood to keep their generational home.

I saw it here in Atlanta. There were lots of elderly people who loved hosting people from all over the world that would come to their houses, stay with them and create all these amazing experiences. It’s about telling that side of the story too. Are we a part of gentrification? Anything in an urban area that’s thriving, unfortunately, has to deal with gentrification. Having these discussions build better communities and helps not just our industry but these communities at large. That’s the interesting thing that I’ve seen through this. Dave, you’ve had these challenging conversations with people. I’ve seen you have this amazing ability to do on-the-spot conversions.

I do see people listening to you when you talk that’s ideologically opposed to you and could be on the other side of the fence. You have this ability to bring it to a level where it’s like, “Let’s have a conversation.” When you leave those conversations, I see that you’ve considered and listened and heard. I think they have too. Tell me about that super skill. Wherever we are, if there’s somebody different or on the other side, you will go talk, engage and have a conversation with them.

That might be one of the nicest compliments, Mateo. I appreciate that. I like to talk but I also like to listen. I wish I talk less. That’s the thing. A lot of people don’t see, realize or think about how interrelated, interdependent and integrated short-term rentals are in every community at this point. There are 2,000 plus town cities in the United States with 100 or more short-term rentals. A couple of years ago, it was closer to 1,000. This rise in the ubiquity of short-term rentals is everywhere. The more we listen, the sooner and faster people accept and appreciate short-term rentals because they are not a part of the program at this point and I don’t know that we’re listening enough yet.

People have great solutions. Ultimately, the mission we’re on is to make sure that people know, A) We’re listening and, B) We’re taking action and trying to resolve these issues that people are very much valid in bringing up, granted sometimes people are hell-bent against change or don’t want something different in the neighborhood. I honestly understand that because I don’t think that we’ve done a great job yet in this space, putting our values first and that listening ear first and then inviting people into the conversation. There’s the proverbial table. We got to get everybody at the same table and have conversations.

It’s hard because if we’re talking about the 2% that are vocally against the 100% here, these are the ones that are the neighbors to that party house. These are the ones that no matter what you say or do are going to be the most vocal at the town hall meetings. It’s that squeaky wheel. They are on a witch hunt. That’s hard to combat and that’s why a company and what you’re doing with Rent Responsibly is so important. You mentioned too that there are 2,000 towns with 100 or more short-term.

It’s 2,100 with 100 hundred or more in a 2019 statistic.

A stat that I have is there are 25,000 vacation rental companies in the US alone.

Six hundred thousand owners, hosts and managers.

Look at the difference in that space, 600,000 versus 25,000. Is this all a result of its success? We’re young in this still, maybe in the urban markets. I’m not going to say it’s an urban problem but this is grown into urban areas. This is the growth of the urban short-term rental, the urban condotel, even the vacation rental that’s in your neighborhood that typically, bed and breakfast exist and things like that. This is a new animal. Isn’t that part of this?

I don’t think it’s an urban thing. Urban is one part of it. Look at the mountain markets. These mountain communities are against this and there are lots of fights.

Colorado.

I’m not as in tune with those markets. I didn’t know it was as bad in traditional vacation rental markets too. I get it, hotel threat, resort threat and anything that’s a threat.

I’d love to put this in the context of five years from 2021 when none of us is even remotely close to a clear crystal ball. What is safe to say is short-term rentals will be around and likely more well-adapted, well-used, well-managed, well-standardized, well-professionalized and well-accepted than they are in 2021. If we say that and we say that short-term rentals are already likely in every community and are likely to continue to be in every community, then the question becomes, “How do we harness short-term rentals to help as many people as possible, as opposed to hinder the growth such that it’s always a battle?”

“How do we adjust our sales to capture this prevailing wind and consumer demand to lift, speed up and accelerate values, projects and initiatives that everybody benefits from?” There’s a ton of this going on across the country already. Rent Responsibly’s mission is to listen and pay attention to what is working and then help other communities learn from other communities.

Going several years out makes everything super clear, whether it’s urban or mountain. COVID is a great disruption that nobody saw coming and will ever want to go through again. In several years, we might look back and be glad it accelerated pacification or created harmony that we don’t even see to settle this stuff. If you will indulge me, I’ll give you the best historical example I’ve ever seen. I’m going to rev up my engine, no pun intended.

In 1908, the Ford Model T rolls off the assembly line. The roads at that point are built for horses and buggies that are going 5 miles an hour. There were already cars on the road but they were chauffeured and there were about 200,000 of them. Within 7 or 8 years, there were 2 million cars on the road. They’re immediately ubiquitous and on every road. The horses and buggies are still going 5 miles an hour but there are traffic accidents and traffic jams. Kids didn’t play in the backyard. They played in the street because that was the space where they played. There was all this calamity going on.

There were calls to ban the automobile, which is something we hear like we need to ban short-term rentals, which are not harnessing things. That’s hindering them. By the 1920s, the American Automobile Association, auto enthusiasts, Ford companies and cities got together around the proverbial table along with people who thought cars shouldn’t co-exist on the roads and said, “How are we going to work this out?” They adopted using three major buckets, systems that worked ultimately called the Detroit Plan, where they mastered policy, education and technology. Education was looking both ways type of education for pedestrians.

The policy was speed limits, turn signals, requiring safety and then also requiring education, which was driver’s ed and driver’s licenses. By the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, you start to see a dramatic safety increase. In the 1950s, there was the National Highway Safety Act, I believe it was called, mandating different safety elements. Fast forward, 70 years later from the ’20s so by the ’90s and 2000s, it is 90% safer to drive in an automobile in the ’90s than it was in the 1920s. They are on the road and coexist. There are massive economies built around it.

People are traveling further and faster discovering the world more safely. It’s the way we assume the world always was. That’s a 70-year span. Rent Responsibly is trying to lead that charge in 5 to 7 years, not 50 to 70. The world works so much faster and they did it by seeing what worked and saying that speed limits should be increments of 5, not increments of 2.8. You have 30 miles an hour in residential. Those things didn’t come out of nowhere.

Here’s an interesting tidbit of information. I live in Fort Wayne, Indiana. My house was built in 1928. My neighborhood started in the 1920s and was built as a driving parkway. There’s a median in the middle meant to cruise in your cars and go around. It’s picturesque. We live in a historic district of Fort Wayne but it was built specifically for automobiles to drive around on cruise and look at the houses in the ’20s.

That is extremely novel. In 1908, when the Ford Model T rolls off, who could have predicted that? The most valuable companies then were the leather companies that made the saddles for the horses. The other thing I’ll say is the people that are attracted to short-term rentals fundamentally are hospitality inclined. That is not automatable. Hospitality is 10% of the global economy. It’s the fastest-growing sector. Sub-sector of accommodation is short-term rentals. It’s the fastest growing sector of the fastest-growing sector of the global economy and impervious to automation in certain elements.

That is something we can’t ignore because ultimately, where are the jobs that we have 5 or 10 years from 2021? Short-term rental is a growing space. We need to harness this incredible economic engine for everybody’s benefit. That’s the ticket. That is the way the proverbial west was won because neighbors and cities need to win too. Those are people who want to travel this way when they travel. In their town, they don’t want to deal with some of the stuff that in the last several years has built the narrative and we’re going to change that narrative.

Fifteen percent of the global lodging market, at least that’s the stat I have, is short-term rentals.

15% to 20%. A crazy stat too, short-term rentals were 10% of the total lodging spent pre-pandemic. Guess what the high water mark was during the pandemic? I didn’t want you to guess over high but it went from 10% to 25% and it’s going to settle somewhere in between. Things are crazy in flux. All we know is that short-term rentals are popular and becoming more popular.

We’re talking several years in the future. We don’t have a crystal ball. By looking at several years in the future, it’s easier to see where we’re going to be. I want to talk about 2022. We’re kicking off 2022’s busy season. What are your big challenges in 2022 with Rent Responsibly? You are using your crystal ball here. What are your biggest challenges and biggest wins as a short-term space?

I don’t know but I know what we’re working on now. If we listen, observe and get very specific about where Rent Responsibly can add value to local communities, where our capacities lie and lean into those areas and then simultaneously observe what is working around the country on the peripheral and build a little bit of a flywheel where we’re incorporating programs that work into what we do well, that’s the next several months in 2021. In some ways, the answer is we’ve created a system and a formula where Rent Responsibly, with our partners, which are large and small companies, local and national in the short-term rental space, are able to help communities come together under local leadership.

Local leaders are making all the decisions. They’re interacting with everybody locally. That is a local operation. We’re taking the time burden of keeping that group together, well-informed, educated, meeting and community building. That’s what we do well. The areas where on the front end that those local leaders are pushing initiatives, I’ll use a couple of examples but if we can take these couple of examples and then bring them to the dozen or so communities that we work with, that is the new muscle that we need to build. How do we take what works? It worked in one place. Can we make it work in all ten? Grow that number of ten higher and higher as well.

One of the examples back to Colorado, the group in Summit County has put out an initiative called Welcome Workforce. They want to help improve this workforce housing issue, which is endemic to all vacation destinations but certainly the mountain cities and destinations in Colorado. How do we help folks convert short-term rentals that maybe don’t want to do that anymore back into long-term housing, put up a new supply of workforce housing or create funds or generate new funds to support rent subsidies for workforce housing? Workforce housing is seasonal but there’s also a twelve-month-of-the-year issue. When that works in 1 place, that’s a mountain destination, can it work in 3, 4 or 5 destinations and proliferate?

Another is a simple program that we put together in Dallas called The Emergency Accommodations Program. It was something that the Dallas Short-Term Rental Alliance put together very quickly during the incredible Snowmageddon or the big freeze in February where everything froze, my property, pipes and my grandmother’s properties and pipes. What the short-term rental community did, because a lot of people had to cancel and weren’t arriving, is saying, “Anybody with power, can we offer housing to people without power, whether they’re a neighbor, somebody stranded or a traveler?” We worked with the city a little bit but the short-term rental community led that effort.

A couple of months later, there were mudslides in Oahu. We took that same program and said to the leaders, “Do you want to turn on this program?” We were then trying to do that. That’s the way these programs proliferate positively. If we can get that muscle where we see what works and then try it in multiple places, there’s a multiplier effect there. I want that to be what we’re known for. We have this toolbox of 30, 40 and 50 programs over time where short-term rentals are part of the solution to community issues.

In practice, it’s great logistics. It’s worked here and you’re putting in a place here. It works for other industries. Why can’t it work for ours? I say industries but the things you’re doing are housing with both the Dallas and the mountain. It’s amazing. It makes so much sense. Kudos to you and your team for listening. I love that. You’re a great listener and your team listens. We need more of that.

Shout-out to your team.

The throughline on the team and broader speaking the industry we seem to work with is this passion. Passion can come in a lot of forms and can attract a lot of different people. The one thing we have enough of for days, years and generations in the short-term rental community is passion. The function of Rent Responsibly, I had to describe this once, was building a bridge from passion to practical utility, implementation and programs of that passion. As we build that bridge, we’re taking this energy and putting it to use, going from potential energy to kinetic energy, a physical concept that comes from people.

Alexa, my Cofounder, was so passionate about Chapel Hill. She wasn’t even a host but she was like, “This is wrong. This conversation’s going sideways around short-term rentals.” She said, “I’m starting this Chapel Hill Short-Term Rental Alliance,” not even a host and did it. It took her 50 hours to do it and set up the websites and the mail. We were talking about this before we were officially working together. I was like, “Fifty hours and you know what you’re doing and you’re volunteering?”

We can’t expect there to be an Alexa in every single community. We took her system and we’re trying to get that down to 5 hours and make it 90% faster and more efficient. That’s the Holy Grail because we have the passion as a team to do that. We are doing it the hard way and building these efficiencies. The future’s so bright. We’re not going to get there as fast as we want to but we have passionate solutions, value and the right people. The flywheel is starting to spin and our job is to keep it spinning faster and faster.

Congrats. It’s fun to watch. Teo and I here at the show are huge supporters of you all and what you’re doing. Anything we can to help get your word out, lean on us.

I got one last question for you. I was thinking about what I wanted to ask you. I know that you would give a great answer to this. At the end of the run, when you decide to retire, walk away and whenever you elevate to whatever’s next for you, what do you want your footprint to be? What do you want in your words? From your viewpoint, how do you want your experience to have shaken out?

Honestly, that is such a difficult question but I’ll try to answer it. I’m going to go to something near to my heart and that’s the idea of being a peaceful person. I run the conflict, stand on the edge of it and try to think, “What are these people not seeing that would solve both person’s problems but the emotion and the passion are too high for them to see it?” I had a guru and life coach. I asked him what the point of life was. This was several years ago. He goes, “The goal in life is to be one more peaceful soul in the universe.” He’s a bit out there. I love the guy, John Wyrick. Look him up.

I was like, “Come on. Give me a real answer.” Eventually, I realized the more peaceful you are as an individual, the more people around you become a little more peaceful and so on. That’s a win-win-win. Being peaceful, settled and comfortable with yourself, vibrating calm and things like that out into the universe helps other people.

As an organization, when I graduate from Rent Responsibly, if I ever do, it should be a force for calming waters, creating harmony and a lot more good where other people want good things for themselves but they don’t see that third way where there’s a way to harness all this stuff for both of our benefit. That would be the legacy I would most like to achieve.

Thanks for coming and joining us. You had some expectations. You had three cups of coffee. We got a text message letting us know how excited you were to come and we are excited too. I hope that we at least held our end with this conversation. You did. Truly, anytime, you’re welcome to come back, join us and talk. No bullshit.

No bullshit. I love to bullshit. We’re bullshitting. That means saying how it is. I can’t thank you enough. Honestly, the idea is that you all are taking your time to let people tell stories. This industry is a big story wrapped in a lot of stories but all these stories are local and need to be told and celebrated. Five years from 2021, we don’t know what our stories are, let alone the community that we’re a part of. It’s going to be exciting and you are on the front end of spreading the word. I appreciate it.

We’re trying to harness what we do and more of what we’ve done that’s seen in the background where real conversations happen and bring that to the forefront because they’re valuable. This has been awesome and we appreciate you coming on. Any last shout-outs, John? Anything else we need to plug? VRMA, DEI. Check out John and I’s panel. We’ll point you towards the calendar when we get more information on dates and everything. We want you guys to come back out and check out our DEI panel in 2022. It’s going to be a great one, a conversation hosted by John and me from the main stage.

Thank you, Dave, for the other event. Dave is a sponsor of the DEI boot camp we’re running, which will be October 3rd, 2021. We’ll shoot out some more information as well. Speakers are all locked down. It’s going to be great. We have a lot of things coming out shortly. We want to make sure we get everyone in attendance that wants to come to that. Dave, thank you again for stepping up and sponsoring that. That’s huge for us.

I’ll make a little point here for anybody who’s reading. The areas where our community can push the envelope, where we need to as a society but we can lead and I truly believe is the DEI Initiatives. We don’t have a lot of resources at Rent Responsibly. The first sponsorship of anything else we ever did was when Mateo asked for the DEI workshop and if we could do that, I said absolutely. We hope to do more in the future. Also, eco-conscious practices with short-term rentals.

Let’s be honest, over the next several years, the global climate issue, is an area that I think about a lot. How do we share best practices? How do we ensure that short-term rentals are not following but leading in terms of tourism and hospitality being a leading, cutting-edge frontier on building eco and sustainability initiatives into everything? We got to create the world we want to live in and we have an opportunity to do that. I’m so happy you asked, Mateo and John.

We got to dig into that. The eco-sustainability is crucial for us. It’s only going to become more crucial. We don’t hear enough of that being yelled from the rafters so let’s talk about that because we want to make sure that that’s something we address on this platform as well. It’s real. We see it, whether your homes are burning in Tahoe or you’re dealing with rising floodwaters in whatever community you’re in or New Orleans, Louisiana and those coastal communities that have been devastated. These are all real results of climate change and we can’t be sitting by idly and watching so raise that flag.

Thanks again, David. We appreciate you joining us for episode eighteen. We got lots of amazing guests lined up in the future. If you aren’t downloading or it’s your first one, read our previous shows. We had some amazing conversations and we have amazing ones scheduled in the future. Thanks again.

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Important Links

• Rent Responsibly
• NoiseAware
• VRMA
• Megaphone.fm/AdChoices