As Furnished Finder approaches its 10-year anniversary, it seems like a perfect time to share how excited we are for the next 10 years together. My name is Jeff Hurst, and I am the President and CEO of Furnished Finder. I recently joined the company and would like to introduce myself – and share how Furnished Finder seeks to help each of you achieve your goals in the mid-term rental industry.
We have put together two ways to learn about what is coming next for Furnished Finder.
You can either keep reading this blog post, and/or tune into our 100th episode of The Landlord Diaries (opens in new tab), our weekly podcast, to hear more about:
What you can expect from us in the coming months
Things you can do now to prepare for the upcoming changes
What the Furnished Finder team has been focused on since I joined
Why I was excited to join the Furnished Finder opportunity (hint: Mid-term rentals are primed for huge growth ahead!)
What you can expect from us in the coming months:
Our goals at Furnished Finder are simple:
Maximize your return on your investment: We aim to put respectful tenants in your homes at attractive monthly rates, while continuing to give you complete control of who stays in your home. We want to do this at a low annual cost while also minimizing the time it takes to manage your tenants from Furnished Finder. We want to consistently be your highest return investment as a landlord.
Save tenants money: We aim to enable tenants to find and book perfect monthly rentals DIRECTLY with you. We do not charge booking fees, thereby saving travelers thousands of dollars by avoiding the fees other platforms charge. To do so, we will be investing in driving demand to your properties with digital marketing and improved experiences. Connecting with tenants on Furnished Finder and booking directly with them will allow you to provide a great experience while they save a significant amount on booking fees. It's a win for everyone.
To achieve our goals, here’s what we’re focused on next:
To increase tenant demand, we will soon be unveiling a new property details page to better market your property. The new page layout will better highlight your property’s unique amenities, be more accessible on mobile devices, and increase the visibility of your contact details. We are also making improvements to our website’s search functionality to better match tenants with your rental property.
We know your time is valuable, so we are rebuilding our entire technology platform from the ground up to serve you faster on any device (computer, phone, or tablet!). Most of the progress is behind the scenes so far, but big improvements are around the corner. At a minimum, you can expect a better dashboard experience and easier access to KeyCheck products. We will share more details on other improvements over the coming months!
Things you can do now to prepare for the upcoming changes:
While we work on the improvements listed above and many more, there are a few things you can do to be successful. We recommend:
Updating your photos following the suggestions in our eBook (opens in new tab).
If your unit is available, keep the availability date current (do not use a date in the past) and respond to tenant messages in a timely fashion (ideal response time is within an hour).
Use KeyCheck’s (opens in new tab) services to improve the tenant experience and save yourself time. These products are good for both landlords and tenants and usage of them will positively impact your search ranking by the end of 2024.
Keep your listing active and renew on time. Continuous tenure on Furnished Finder reinforces tenant trust (they want to know you are an experienced landlord) and will be highlighted on the new property details page. Tenure will also impact search ranking by the end of 2024.
Expect to hear more from me and the Furnished Finder team over the coming months to help you grow your business with less effort!
Until then, we would love to hear from you to determine where we invest our energy next in better serving you. Please complete the survey (opens in new tab) here to help us learn from your experience.
Keep reading to learn more about what the Furnished Finder team has been focused on since I joined:
My first several months at Furnished Finder have been focused on hiring a team to better serve your needs – and learning more about how you use our service and where we can improve. A few highlights from the past few months include:
We added over 50 people to the team since I joined in October, including a world class executive team that you can learn more about here (opens in new tab).
We are investing more than ever in marketing to help more tenants find your properties.
Getting to know each of you! I have been meeting our landlords at conferences and hosting meet and greets with some of you at our offices in Austin. In addition, we have been analyzing feedback from our customer service team, and while Furnished Finder works well for many of you, it is clear there are several things we can do better for you moving forward.
To learn more about the opportunity I see ahead for mid-term rentals, check out a talk I gave recently in this video (opens in new tab) from Skift’s Short Term Rental Summit.
Lastly, a bit more about my experience and why I joined Furnished Finder
I have been in the travel technology industry since 2010, serving in various roles including as Chief Strategy Officer of HomeAway (prior to being acquired by Expedia Group), President of Vrbo, and most recently as Chief Operating Officer of Expedia. Having spent most of the past decade plus in the short-term rental category – I see a massive opportunity to help tenants and landlords benefit from the growing category of monthly furnished rentals.
I am thrilled to have joined Furnished Finder as the new President and CEO. I am most excited about the life changing opportunity for entrepreneurial landlords to create wealth and benefit their communities by embracing the monthly rental strategy. It is clear this category is just getting started, and I am energized to join you as we make mid-term rentals a more widely known housing option!
Grateful for your partnership,
Jeff Hurst
President and CEO, Furnished Finder
Episode 100 Transcript
Welcome to The Landlord Diaries, where we talk about midterm rentals and the opportunities behind them. We'll share landlord stories, talk about maximizing investment potential, and discuss how to live the very best landlord life. This podcast is proudly brought to you by Furnished Finder, the leader and largest online marketplace for midterm rentals.
Remember to like and subscribe if you enjoy our content. It's your host team of the Landlord Diaries, Kelly Bailey and Katie Lyon coming to you from the Furnished Finder marketing team. Katie, we are mixing things up, doing things a little different today. Have a new series coming up. Tell us what can we expect from today's episode.
Yeah, today, you guys we really went off track in the best way. Some of you probably don't know this, but about six or seven months ago, we got a brand new president and CEO Jeff Hurst. And it was like we all got a new boss and a new job that we didn't interview for. So we all went through this period of a little bit of what's happening, what's going on?
I don't know what to do here. A little bit of anxiety, a lot of excitement, and it's just time for a check-in. It's time for everybody to meet Jeff on a deeper level, and it's time to let you guys in behind the scenes a little bit about what are we doing, what are we working on, what's the vision of Furnished Finder?
Where are we gonna take this thing? And how is it gonna impact everyone? So we are interviewing our boss today, so you'll get to meet Jeff. Incredibly smart, incredibly generous, and just. We are all so pumped to have him amongst so many other new members of the team as we just go into this next chapter, our Furnished Finder.
But really who gets them to be the most excited is the travelers and the landlords, because you guys are gonna see. So many amazing updates and changes and it's gonna take time 'cause it's a lot of work and it's a lot of things that, that we need to make happen. But it's all gonna be so incredibly great.
So welcome to behind the scenes of Furnished Finder, and we're so excited to talk with Jeff also. It's episode a hundred. Kelly, you and I have made it a hundred. Episodes That is so incredible, and I'm just taking a moment here to just give us a little pat on the back because it's so much work to do these podcast episodes, but it's also so much fun.
We've gotten to talk to so many incredible landlords and hosts and I cannot believe that we're sitting here at episode a hundred. So thank you to everybody who has been with us since the beginning, or if you joined us. Whenever we're so happy that you are here and we can't wait for the next 100 as we just keep learning and developing as landlords and as Furnished Finder yay.
Jeff Hurst joined us as CEO and President of Furnished Finder in November, 2023. Prior to this, Jeff spent most of his career at VRBO and Expedia Group. He has a few furnished rentals of his own lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, two kids, and 100 pound bead. Furnished Finder is now headquartered in Austin, Texas and has a newly expanded leadership team with over 275,000 paid listings today.
Furnished Finder is the largest midterm rental marketplace nationwide. Jeff, I'm so excited for you to share all, everything that's coming up with Furnished Finder and how you've joined the team. How are you today? I am doing great and excited to be with you on the show today, longtime listener, first time caller.
Love it. Why don't we start by you telling everyone a little bit more about yourself and why you joined Furnished Finder. Sure. So my name is Jeff Hurst. I'm the CEO and President here. I joined the company in November at the request of the founders who were moving into a board role board roles.
And I have been in Austin since 2010. I actually went to the University of Texas and I'm a lifelong Texan after a brief decade spent in San Francisco. Wife Lauren is a local acupuncturist and so we spend a lot of time kind of dual managing careers. And I've got a 14-year-old daughter, which keeps me very much on my toes.
And a 12-year-old son, which kind of keeps me in shape. And a hundred pound Bernedoodle, who is an absolute terror and spends most of his time eating our clothes. I joined, Furnished Finder because it reminded me of a time in my life that I really loved and I really believe in the opportunity. So I was a early-ish employee at HomeAway, which was the holding company that also ran VRBO, which people are more familiar with, or VRBO now.
And I was there in 2010. Had a variety of roles including chief Strategy Officer when we sold to Expedia. I was the chief commercial officer managing all of our sales teams, and was also the president of vrbo before I became the Chief Operating Officer at Expedia Group. I was looking for something where I could be in a space that I know, and I've got three furnished rentals that have been short term, and I've loved that experience as a landlord and getting to know more about real estate and investing.
And I was looking to do it with people that I love to work with. And we've spent a lot of time since I joined hiring people who really know the space and can really make a difference in a category that I think is gonna have tremendous growth and create life changing wealth and experiences for a lot of our landlords and tenants.
All right. I think that is the perfect introduction. And Jeff, I wanna dive in even more because. Kelly, and I know you on a personal basis now and we get to work with you day in and day out. But everybody else that's learning about your past for the first time, I want them to know more about why you are really primed to come into this role at Furnished Finder and like what, what makes you ready to just like, make our platform so extraordinary?
Yeah. The, when I started. Shame on me, like I think Furnished Finder is like the best kept secret in real estate, or maybe even the internet. I had been an executive in short term rentals for 13 years and for a long time I was in charge of buying platforms that looked like things that would be, good fit for Expedia Group.
And I have never heard a furnish funder. I just did not know it existed. And so when I got to know Brian and Aaron and Lisa and the founding team, the thing that jumped out at me most was like, oh my gosh, this looks like early two thousands. BRVO. Like the way it's designed, the price point, the model, it just looks just like that and it's growing like a weed.
And so for me, the thing that really turned me on with it was actually the pattern recognition of I've seen that problem, I've seen that problem. Oh, I know why they did that, and here's why. There's a different way to do it. There's a better way to do it. And so I loved being able to like, look at this experience, homepage, search page, property details page, and then, people are inquiring, people are using housing requests, all of this stuff. And then the landlord experience, which you know, really has some pain points to go after of onboarding a property. And how do you manage the dash and how do you help?
I'm just like, gosh. We've spent so much time getting this right and here's a platform that kind of invented it from scratch. And so I was excited to come in and apply this knowledge I have, but I was even more excited to do it in a space that I feel like I already know. Because midterm rentals have a lot in common with short-term rentals.
I think they have more in common with long-term rentals. And so I just kept, when I was looking for what I was gonna do next, my, my big test is do I wake up in the middle of the night and write something down? Am I so curious about what's happening that I wanna put something in the notes section on my phone 'cause I don't wanna forget it.
And this was the thing that kept doing that. I was like, oh my gosh, I wonder if they're, I wonder if they've tried this. 2013 we did this. 2015 we did this. 2011 we did. And I was just like, how do we start to fit that together? And I just got really excited to have another at bat in a space that I love.
What I think has been so cool is you're able to bring this experience and recognize those patterns, but also paste it onto the furnished finder plat platform and midterm rentals, knowing that it's not exactly the same. You're able to take oh, I've seen this problem, I've seen this challenge.
I've seen how we help travelers or landlords in this specific way or overcome this obstacle, but here's how we need to twist it, or here's what we should try. So it's very much like we're not trying to reproduce what you did in your past, but more take those lessons and things that you've really been able to take away and apply it.
A really unique way that I think so few people would be able to do. So I think that everybody is gonna benefit from that experience and from us bringing those lessons into the midterm rental marketplace. Yeah, and I think the, more than anything. The seven months have been about trying to get to know who our landlords are, who are our customers, and what do they do.
And a big part of that was getting to know each of you, like you're both like power landlords in the space in terms of how you manage and how you work. And it, while the product experience feels very similar to what we built at for Bo and HomeAway, the landlords are actually quite different.
These are not these aren't vanity homes on the coast. These aren't, it's very infrequent that like the short term rental, especially in the early days, it was not something where like people were buying 'em to make money and like it was the skid rich quick scheme. In the early days it was somebody wanted to spend time with their family on a lake and they needed help paying the taxes or they needed help paying, the interest or the yard.
Nobody was trying to actually cash flow on it. And then over time it changed. And what's different about this is this space feels much more entrepreneurial. And it is people who are looking at something and trying to create wealth and trying to really improve the lives of their families by doing something either in addition to a job or instead of a job.
And that's been quite different from the journey I experienced early at HomeAway. Jeff, you've been with us about seven months now. It feels like we've done so much, but we still have so much to come. What are the things that we have accomplished thus far that you want everyone to know about the most?
Yeah. It's a it's a tried analogy, but the first seven months do feel like the duck in the water. And so we've been doing a lot of things that I don't think our landlords and tenants really feel. And so we've hired almost two dozen people who have a ton of experience in the category, in the space.
They're working in an office in Austin together and we're basically overhauling the technology and the way we communicate with landlords and tenants to get better outcomes. But most of the work that's happening right now is behind the scenes. It's if you're building a house, it's like we're doing the architecture and we're doing the side work.
But nobody's picking out finishings and nobody's thinking about what paint color's gonna be yet. And so you don't feel it on the site the same way. And so I'm really proud of the team we've built and I'm really proud of being how we've identified the way we're going to do the work. But I am excited for people to start feeling the differences in the site.
I'm excited for someone to see the way Onboarding's gonna change or someone to feel how much easier a dash experience can be. We we approach. We approach the job. I'm just like, our job is to help people increase the ROI that's what we're here for. And the return is all about helping someone make more money.
And the investment is all about keeping our prices low. But also, and I think maybe more importantly, helping landlords save time. How do we help you save time? So you can either do more of this, or in a perfect world, spend more time with your family. And those things are. Every day. It's like that's the compass.
And right now we're building everything so that we can go fast on that. And I just want people to, be a little bit patient, but even more excited. It's gonna be so much better. This is really a known science and we can make this so much easier and we're right around the corner. Yeah, I think it's been great.
I love your analogy of building a house because it really has been, I've gone through the process of building two houses and for the first however many months, you're like, have you done. Have you done anything? Have you done anything? And I'll drive by the new house and I'm like, where's the wood?
How about you put in a pipe? Do something. Yeah. But there is so much happening in the background, and it's on purpose so that when you hit the ground running, you can really hit the ground running. And one thing that, that I have noticed is that we have all spent so much time in the past six or seven months listening and learning and from the tenant side and the landlord side, like just really getting to know the users from an entirely different level. So once we get to the point of picking out those paint colors or whatever, that we feel really confident that it's gonna be amazing. And we've been able to put out like little tiny things and as they come out I'm just like, oh, that's perfect.
We're so there on the right track. I'm so excited for, the walls to go up and everybody to really see everything Yeah. That is being drafted. Yeah. What's gonna be, we're building everyone a place they're gonna really be proud of. One of the most enduring quotes in my mind was, as I was getting to know the team Katie said something that I'll never forget, which is the site's just a natural beauty and we've gotta, spend some time, dressing it up and, appliance and makeup and seeing what we can do, it's like we're getting close to that phase. I think what we didn't realize as much was like we were also gonna have to go to the gym and rebuild some things, and that's where we've really been doing is like nutrition and gym. And now the site's gonna start to just feel different in a way that's more modern, but also more usable and make it something that's more referable and something to where more and more people wanna come book all the great homes we have so that they can live their lives.
Yep. I think that's the perfect way to state it. So we've spent all this time learning about landlords and tenants. Tell us some things that you have learned thus far about those two audiences. Some things that surprised you, some things that maybe you expected and just where the value lies and where you're excited to pleasantly surprise them all.
Yeah. On the I think the tenant side's probably been more surprising. And when you just. When you come to the side and just start exploring as a, as a consumer, just what's this thing all about? You would think it was exclusively for travel nurses. Like the language, the tone, and really most of the content is really about traveling medical, but in particular about traveling nurses.
And so one of the things that I was really pleasantly surprised by is that's actually the minority of the audience. And so about a third of our tenants are traveling medical, and most of those are traveling nurses. But we have a huge traveling for work business. And so actually the biggest segment of our tenants are traveling for work non-medical.
That can be big corporate, it can be small business, and it's a really diverse group that's growing very fast. I was pleasantly surprised and like jealous that I didn't know about it when we moved that there's this big relocation business and so it's basically people who are either buying, selling, or moving to a new town and need gap housing and that, I think it's such a great use case.
Like my family was in, we were moving from a house, we were ended up, consolidating into a two bedroom apartment while we finished, and like it was not a good couple months compared to having the option of being in a single family home in our neighborhood. And so that's been a cool use case to understand more, and I think there's a lot we can do to better communities with that.
Similarly, as I think about insurance claims, I had no idea that was a thing. I fortunately haven't had one yet that's caused me to move out of the house. But as I learned more about how people use the site to basically protect going to school, staying in the same commute, being close to friends.
When there's a catastrophe. That was really powerful. And so all these things coming together and, learning about the academic use case too, which, went down that road also. And I think there's just so much we can do for tenants in terms of educating them about the value prop and really driving more business for our landlords on the landlord side, the thing that really jumped out at me most was I went to the midterm rental summit that we hosted in San Diego a few months ago, and.
It's, it seems strange, but like the energy is what affected me the most. How enthusiastic people are to be in the space to learn and to try and grow their businesses or even grow personally. It was different than what I'd been experiencing for the past several years in short term rentals, where a lot more of that is actually transactional and business relationship building as opposed to like, how can I help you?
It felt more like a community and felt a little bit more like early short-term rental days. And as I got to know the landlords, I started to appreciate more how they depend on us, how they use our side, but also just how scrappy they are. I use Furnished Finder this, but I'm also, I.
Building my own side business as a corporate agent to try and tap into this and I've got this financing gig. I was like, oh my gosh, you guys have like thought of so many different things that I wouldn't have thought of. And being able to just be a part of that experience, like I just learned a lot. And that was fun to be in a place to where every conversation I had the potential to just open my eyes to, oh, I'd never thought of it that way.
What a cool way to go do business. What a cool opportunity. Yeah, definitely. Midterm Rental Summit is always energizing. So let's dive deeper into what's to come for Furnished Finder. We've been working on some great updates and the users are going to love it. What are some of those details you can get them excited about?
Sure. It'll all come back to that we're trying to provide a better return on investment. We want to get you more demand, we wanna save you time. That's the goal. I think when I think about getting people more demand, the biggest opportunities actually in matching. And so our algorithm for how we match tenants with landlords is it's rudimentary.
There is a lot of opportunity both in how we use the map and in how we do smarter ranking and sort to distribute demand better and to help tenants find the perfect landlord more often. So that's a change that we're gonna invest a lot of time and communicate more about today. It's basically around availability.
The most important thing you can do to impact ranking is to update your calendar. And in the future, it's gotta be about more things because tenants care about more things. Tenants care about who you are as a landlord and how responsive you are and who you are as a landlord and. How how long have you been doing this?
How trustworthy is the experience, and then they care a lot about the quality of the pictures, the quality of the home, and knowing more about location and kind of the content that can support it. And we really capture a lot of that today. But we don't do a great job of helping, what could be better?
And we don't do a great job of helping tenants filter short and see a wider variety. And so we're gonna invest more in distributing demands. I don't wanna say more equally, but more broadly than we do today, because we're going to care about a broader set of features that we know tenants care about. And so that's gonna be a big stream of work to make that happen.
The first thing that's gonna change for tenants is. What we call the property details page, but it's the page that really highlights everything about your home, and we're completely redesigning that to better showcase how great the homes are and how great the experiences are after we've completed that.
It's happening in parallel, but then you'll start to feel more things of the Dash experience improving. Some of you have noticed that tenant screenings already moved into out of being just in Key Check as a separate site and then to the Furnished Finder experience. We'll be doing the same for the rest of them.
Rest of those products because every click counts and if you're clicking back and forth and logging in and going through magic links, like we just need to remove that friction so more people can get faster value out of our product. And so we'll be redesigning both the dashboard and the listing management experience and we think we can save people a ton of time and get better content and we're really excited about it.
I think what's been cool is right now the site, it works, right? Like we know it works. It works for landlords, it works for tenants, and I always come back to if it works now as the natural beauty that it is, it's only going to get better. And better to all of us who are thinking about the future of Furnished Finder is like you keep saying.
It takes everybody less time to use it, and you have better results. Landlords have better matches. Tenants can find their homes faster and more efficiently, and it's just, it's, you spend less of your time on the site or in the app to find the perfect tenant or the perfect place to stay. Yeah. And really that is, that part of the experience, like it works because the landlords and the tenants care about it working and they each put effort into it. And we just wanna reduce the effort. It's this great community that's self-reinforcing and promoting each other and we just need to make it easier for them to promote each other.
Landlords tell us. And we recently did a survey of several thousand. They love us because of the quality of the tenants, because of the value of the service. We provide both, dollars and the cost, and they love us because of the control we give them. And so we're committed to maintaining those things.
And so as we're redesigning those, and for anyone who thinks oh my gosh, Jeff came from vrbo, they're gonna make this thing like vrbo. We'll take the best parts of vrbo, but we plan to keep this a subscription model. We plan to let you process payments the way you wanna process payments. We think there's a lot of magic in that.
Conversation and letting landlords do their own thing with how they communicate with tenants. Because you're not going somewhere for three days. You're going somewhere for 90 or 120 days. And a lot of those little details like feel better with a conversation that we can enable and we just need to make that even easier.
And honestly, we have to have a lot of those conversations not happen because there are so many times that tenants are reaching out and not getting reply, or they're getting a hundred replies and it can be overwhelming. And so we've just gotta find the right balance. But we're going to maintain, high quality tenants at a great value with landlords and control.
Yeah, I think that's a really good point because we I have heard some landlords are like, I'm so excited for the future of Furnished Finder, but also it works for me. Is it still gonna work for me? And it's we're not changing the core of. Midterm rentals, right? Where we know that direct booking is the best way so that you can talk and communicate and screen tenants and come to your own lease terms like you're saying, but it's really just making everything perform better for the better outcome on both sides.
Yeah, I think, I do think more landlords need to offer digital payments. And accept credit cards or accept, make it easier. But it's not something we have to force. And we don't need to collect the money ourselves. Our stripe product can be better, but we wanna invest in it and make it something that everybody can really have, be easier and more affordable.
And Katie and I are great use cases, right? Like we're not only on the Furnished Finder marketing team. We are midterm rental investors. We've both been doing this for multiple years and over 95% of my bookings come from Furnished Finder. And what's really nice with Furnished Finder is. You do get to have those conversations ahead of time with your potential guests, especially since it's more than a month, right?
So we really love that when I think of going to booking platforms, it always makes me nervous because I think. I don't get to know that guest before I talk with them or before they book. And that's an important part to me that I love about Furnish Fighter and why I put the most effort into Furnish Fighter.
So those are all really great points. As a, each of you, you're it's like I'm cheating and bowling. Like you're each the bumpers that keep me from ending up in the in the gutters. Jeff, don't do that. Lemme tell you why. I hear that a lot from Katie and Kelly. Hey, you know what, we're honest.
Nice analogy. That's what we can offer. Definitely is honesty. All right, so Jeff, what do you wish that furnished? Find landlords knew about how to use the platform best? Sometimes Kelly and I sound like broken records. When we're giving our top. Three to five tips about okay, if you want, you wanna get the most out of Furnished Finder, do X, Y, Z.
But I also want them to hear it from your perspective and point of view of how can people use the platform the best right now. Yeah, I, yeah, I think that's, let me separate into right now and then like how I think about it coming soon. So right now have great high quality photos. Keep your calendar up to date, and this is important, keep it honest.
I hear a lot of people who keep their calendar up to date, but it's for a home that's not actually available because they're thinking about trying to get someone to another home, or they wanna just understand who's coming for their own research. I'm like, that's really tough on the tenant experience.
So it needs to be, it needs to be up to date and it needs to be honest, an honest representation of what's available. And if a tenant reaches out, you've gotta reply. Reply fast, reply wholesomely. And remember that the, at tenant's experience is the sum of all these tiny interactions on our site with landlords and with Furnished Finder.
And if they keep having interactions that feel like they're a little bit off in terms of the landlords trying to help them solve something because maybe the landlord has an additional agenda of also trying to learn something, then it's disjointed. And so we wanna really help everyone have a very honest, seamless experience as tenants, and then help landlords enable that the future.
And if you're. Calendar's up to date, you're replying and you've got great photos, like the site should work for you and. The future is gonna be a lot of things I talked about earlier, and it's going to be, helping people to understand who you are as a landlord, better helping short order to get more demand to you.
And we will also start to encourage using more of our tools so that we have better data around what a great landlord you are. Did you get a booking? If you use a key check product, we know If you don't know. So there'll be some advantages to using Key Check, but. They won't be overwhelmed by if you just tell us more about your business and how we can help, then we can better help solve for what you're trying to do with your business.
We think we're a great price point and wanna have more inventory, but what we really want to do is help more tenants find homes. And so we've gotta keep growing tenants faster than inventory and we think these changes we're gonna make can really do that. And so in the immediate it's photos and an up-to-date calendar that's honest and stay on top of inquiries and phone calls and know that sometimes your phone probably rings and it's because we sent it to you and we can do a better job helping you understand that, hey, that came from Furnished Finder and we're gonna do that.
And then in the future just. Look out for our emails. We're going to be really honest and we're gonna be really frequent in our communication of here's what you need to do to succeed. And it is going to raise the bar, for a lot of landlords in our community. But in doing that, so many more tenants are gonna have great experiences and they're gonna tell more tenants and it's just gonna make this all that much better.
Definitely, Jeff, as we grow, what's your goals and vision for Furnished Finder? One of my regrets at my of my tenure when we were HomeAway and vrbo and even even some of the Expedia journey was that the goals were either kind of statistic focused or try and beat Airbnb or try and be bigger than something.
And so that's not, it's not a really big part of the vernacular here anymore. Like the goal is to help landlords improve their ROI. And the goal is to help tenants have a stay that makes their life better. And how we calibrate on that and move forward. It's not a, I don't have a concrete, I need to have X by Y, but I need to understand each of those sides of the marketplace better every day.
And we need to make progress, ideally every day, hopefully every week, definitely every month, to where people feel that it's improving. If we keep improving and we keep listening and we stay honest with our customers, then it's gonna get a lot better and we're gonna, the success that comes is gonna happen.
But the emphasis on predicting it or milestone it is not as big of a piece of my personality, and thus, somewhat the team's personality, as of would've been 10 years ago. Yeah, I think a big part is feedback too. So we've talked about how we've gathered so much feedback since you've been here, and if there's a landlord listening to this that has additional feedback that they think would be valuable for us, what are the best ways that, that they can send those messages in to us and the team where we can really make sure that we prioritize and hear them?
Yeah, so we have a, there's several ways to get in touch with us. We have an incredible customer service operation and you can actually chat with them. You can call them, you can send them emails. There's so many ways to get in touch with 'em, and we take that feedback incredibly seriously, and it's a big part of how we inform our roadmap.
We've mentioned we've been launching surveys and so we recently completed one. That'll be a bigger part of what we do moving forward. Is basically surveying landlords and tenants so we can best learn from each other and help people improve. Additionally we are investing more in the Facebook group, which a lot of people are members of, and really trying to understand like, what's the zeitgeist?
What are people talking about? How do we pick up on it? How do we help? And we are also launching an advisory board where we rotate through prior guests of landlord diaries. To help them inform either new products launches or the way that we're planning to better serve landlords and tenants. So each of these are mechanisms to where I think we can really get, both like big data signals in terms of how the site works and re-engineering survey signals, and then one-on-one conversations and.
I'm in the Austin community, I've hosted several landlords for lunch at our office, just trying to get 'em to know better, how does this work? What are you doing? What do we need to know? And we'll keep doing that too. And so I think we're going to the, our empathy and understanding is gonna increase probably even faster than this experience is gonna improve.
And then the experience is gonna start to catch up and it's gonna be, exponential because of how much we've learned along the way. All right. I think this has been such a great recap of where we've been, what we're working on, how to make the site amazing right now, and most importantly, and most excitedly what our big plans for the future are.
So I just want, Jeff, as we wrap up to you, let everybody know when they will hear from us again with our next big update and how to make sure that they really stay in the loop. Yeah. Concurrent with this episode of Landlord Diaries, we're also basically emailing all of our landlords a notification around Hey, here's what's coming around the corner.
Things to be aware of, behaviors you might want to invest in, improve to be successful in the future. When we send that, and that'll be early summer, we will include in that when to expect to learn more from us. I think that people should generally expect, we're always gonna be sending monthly landlord communications.
Those will increasingly have more information about what we're up to, but we'll probably start to be more on a quarterly cadence of Hey, something really changed and we want you to know. And so it'll be almost a feature release, digest of changes we've made in the product. Changes we want you to be aware of.
So that each of you can be more successful. So I'd say look for an email in the coming weeks, that's going to include a summary of what's to come over the back half of the year and when each of you can expect to learn more, so that you're all in a place to be successful as the site experience improves.
Jeff, thanks for being our fearless leader. We're excited for all the updates to come. If you would like to tune in to more stories from Furnished Finder hosts, don't forget to listen to The Landlord Diaries, subscribe, comment, share it with a friend. We release new episodes every week. Thank you so much, and we'll catch you again next week.