The Challenge:
Cedar Creek Lake Getaways was growing, but its booking processes and operations were stuck in "hobby business" mode.
When Morgan Page’s father passed away, she was left with the small vacation rental property-management business he had first launched as a way to keep busy during his retirement. Page realized that managing properties on picturesque Cedar Creek Lake, southeast of Dallas, made her happy in a way that previous jobs had not. But she still had her life to live in Fort Worth.
Then, within a year, her mother passed away, too. That’s when Page inherited the five vacation rental properties her parents had invested in over the years as her father’s property-management gig grew. “We lost one, we added one, I was trying to stay organized, trying to keep up,” she says. And that’s when she realized she needed some level of automation if she was going to maintain, and eventually grow, her parents’ legacy, and make property management her career.
“We lost one, we added one,
I was trying to stay organized, trying to keep up.”
The Solution:
Page discovered the Futurestay PMS platform through website-builder Wix, which she’d used to create a site for her VRPM business.
When she tried it she was immediately sold: “It was so user friendly for someone like myself,” with limited management experience and a small but growing property portfolio. Designed specifically for independent vacation rental property managers who want to professionalize their operations, Futurestay helped Page manage her listing seamlessly across different booking channels. The software platform also automated Page’s guest communications and payment processing.
Along with automating operations with Futurestay, Page chose privacy-safe noise solution NoiseAware to automate noise monitoring and mitigation at her properties. She started by identifying properties with neighbors who were particularly sensitive to noise, and installing NoiseAware sensors in these “problem” properties.
Based on the results of the noise-mitigation platform, which measures decibel levels and duration of noise, and automatically resolves noise issues through guest messaging, Page rolled out NoiseAware to additional properties, and plans to bring the in-stay monitoring solution to at least three more properties by the end of the year.
NoiseAware monitoring protects Cedar Creek Lake Getaways’ growing portfolio against complaints and damage.
The Results:
With Futurestay in place to automate channel management, guest messaging and transactions, Page was able to grow Cedar Creek Lake Getaways’ portfolio to more than 20 properties.
So successful has the implementation been that, “We have a waiting list now,” Page says. “Something has to sell for us to be able to take on another property.” And with NoiseAware in place to provide in-stay insights into how guests are behaving while at her properties, and solve late-night noise events with gentle messaging. Page can rest easy knowing she won’t be getting complaints from neighbors – a major problem prior to the NoiseAware implementation.
Even better, Page gets to focus on connecting with her staff, which has grown to 40 employees. And she can turn more attention to ensuring the best possible guest experience at her properties, which is the part of VR property management that captured her heart from the get-go.
4X
property growth over three years
Futurestay automation let
Cedar Creek Lake Getaways grow from 5 to more than 20 properties over three years.
“The bigger we got, the more our name got out there. But when guests said, ‘What do you have open?’ I didn’t have a platform to check. Futurestay let me do that, so that I could say to guests, before their stay, ‘We care, we’re here, we’ll take care of you.’ NoiseAware gives me a heads-up so I can monitor my properties when guests are there.”
-Morgan Page, Owner, Cedar Creek Lake Getaways