GamedayHousing

Our first review

Chris Brusznicki — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 02:46:21 +0000

In this first ever craigslist spam review we hope to help those who may have received this scam email while poke fun at those scammers who make our craigslist posting life SO fun!

Original Email:

** CRAIGSLIST ADVISORY — AVOID SCAMS BY DEALING LOCALLY
** Avoid: wiring money, cross-border deals, work-at-home
** Beware: cashier checks, money orders, escrow, shipping
** More Info: http://www.craigslist.org/about/scams.html

Hi , how are you doing over there???. I and my Husband (Mr and Mr Larry Larson) and we want to rent your vacation for our coming to your
location for 8days, Please get back to me to know if is still available for us and we don’t have any Pet.

Best regard to you.
Mr and Mrs Larson.

Overal review: 2 out of 10

Greeting: (3 out of 10) Polite but confusing. I love a polite guest as much as anyone else but typically when someone asks me “how I’m doing over there?” I’m either a. falling behind in a group run or b. have just had my foot run over by a bus. Further, though English has failed to embrace the thrice repeated question mark as much as it has the triple axle of punctuation known as the ellipses (i.e. …) I can only imagine that “???” would imply something along the lines of “no seriously, it really looks like that bus crushed your foot, how are you doing over there???” Confused, yet genuinely interested, I pressed onto the body of this spam scam.

Body: (1 out of 10) Something about a husband named ‘Mr. and Mrs. Larson’ smacks of scam. Look, English is a difficult language to master, and though it may seem obvious enough that the parantheses is reserved for listing an example some scammers just can’t figure this out. As a result we get this gem: I and my Husband (Mr and Mr Larry Larson) Frankly, I had a very difficult time moving onto the rest of the email while I was stuck with the vision of a poor couple trying to introduce themselves in this never ending matryoshka doll of greetings “I’m Mr. and Mrs. Larson and this is Mrs. Mr. and Mrs. Larson.”

Either way, my interest was piqued when I realized that my guests wanted “to rent your vacation for our coming to your location for 8days” An 8 day rental! What an opportunity. I wasn’t sure whether these guests meant that they wanted to rent our vacation rental for their home coming to our location. Further, it seemed kind of odd that the scammers wouldn’t even bother customizing my location to at least where my vacation rental was. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be.

Misc: (5 out of 10) No pets is clearly a plus! If I was at all put off by their scam email I was surely lured back in by the thought of locking down yet another “pet free” rental! Clearly, these scammers knew how to close a solicitation. With best regards to me, I managed to chuckle for a second as I clicked spam and sent these spammers to the spam box once and for all.

So that’s it! If you’ve received this scam email or one like it let us know what you thought. We’d love to hear from you.

When should you get paid?

Chris Brusznicki — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 20:55:32 +0000

When Geoff and I bought our first vacation home Geoff was still in law school and I was fresh from serving in Iraq. To say our new business needed cash is like saying Justin Bieber needs a haircut. We clearly not only preferred payments upfront, but also needed them to survive. That said, the first group of guests we ever booked wouldn’t send us a check until they verified that we were truly Notre Dame alums by calling the registrar’s office.

Sounds crazy, but it takes a lot to send someone you’ve only met over the internet a check for $1,500. That was in 2006 and with the rise of craigslist scams, “cash, upfront” has become even less appealing. Throw in the pressures of the recession and one can see how this policy may reduce how much you make year to year. Below we examine this problem of when you should get paid by focusing on maximizing your take home income. We also examine three popular solutions for payment timing – upfront, 50/50, and our escrow based system.

The background – what your guests want
Credit cards, pay as late as possible, and ideally their cool new rewards card that gives them cash back!

Think about it: how often do you pay upfront and in full for something that you won’t use for a year? I can’t think of anything aside from airplane tickets, some hotel reservations during peak travel times, and a product that is being shipped to you (not perfect but I can’t think of anything else). People generally don’t like paying upfront unless something is really, really scarce and even then they usually want a discount. A quick glance on Amazon or Google bears this out.

What about your guests? Even they dislike paying in advance and only do so for two reasons:

Scarcity – Plane tickets, hotel rooms, and your home are scarce and run out because people tend to plan in advance.
Trust – They trust the people they’ve bought from to deliver on what was promised.

Your home is definitely scarce because it’s one of a kind. Still, your home doesn’t have a brand name like the Ritz Carlton or Southwest Airlines, so it’s kind of tough to ask guests to trust you the same way. Additionally, most guests are comforted by the fact that their credit card companies can back them up if everything didn’t go as planned. Is it possible that you’re leaving money on the table by asking for cash upfront? Maybe, but as Geoff and I know all too well, you’ve got a business to run and bills to pay and trust is a two way street.

Bottom Line: Guests don’t like paying upfront but in our industry we’ve found that they only balk about paying 100% upfront when they’re more than 30 days away from checking-in. Price can be an issue as well because people don’t like tying up thousands of dollars on a single credit card. Still guests will pay upfront in full so long as they are confident they’ll get what they paid for and have someone to help them if that doesn’t happen.

Your priorities as a business owner
Paying your expenses and ensuring you earn what you plan to earn (aka get paid)

As Steve Rogers, one of my favorite professor’s at Kellogg, remarked, “anyone can make a sale when they give their product away for free.” You want your home rented and could probably fill your calendar this week if you just took guests at their word that they’d pay you at check-in or check-out. But you’d be giving your home away for free and run into lots of problems if your guests changed their mind or decided to go with a different property and not tell you.

Bottom Line: It’s easy to get commitments by phone or email, but until they pay you haven’t really “booked” your home.

Getting paid – Three quick tips
Making sure you get paid is as easy as 1, 2, 3.

Get a a contract (aka lease) – A written contract, signed by both parties and written in accordance with your local state law is enforceable. Still you’ll have to collect and there’s no guarantee you will be able to do so, contract or not.
Get advanced payment – For reservations that are very far in advance most owners require a large down payment and the balance due at some point prior to check-in. The trick is in how much to take up front and when to collect the balance.
Increase your payment options – It costs money to accept credit card or paypal, but guests trust these options and it is foolish to not accept them. Though paypal and credit cards offer fraud protection, it is still hard to get a guest to send you payment directly because of identity theft and trust issues.

Payment Options
It’s pretty clear that upfront is tough, so what else can do you?

Staggered payments – After 2 years of operation we migrated from upfront payments to a 50/50 structure whereby 50% was due on booking, and the remainder was due 60 days prior to check-in. This structure gave us enough money to pay expenses while making us reasonably comfortable that we’d be able to get another guest if ours canceled or failed to pay their balance. In these situations we always gave a refund to the original group if we were able to get a second group of renters. In the long run our reputation was worth more to us than the extra $800 or so associated with a non-refundable deposit, but more on that in a future post.
Escrow payments – In 2008, we thought about offering up our services to other property owners and pondered what we’d like most as a guest or owner. As an owner, we knew above all else we just want to know that we’ll be paid 100% guaranteed. As guests, we knew we would want to know that we’d get what we paid for and we’d have someone to turn to if that didn’t happen. After a lot of thought we realized that at a minimum, we’d have to hold payments from owners until after they delivered on their rental, and guests would have to pay upfront either in part or in full. If you think you’ve seen this model somewhere before, you have – this is exactly how nearly every other real estate transaction works, simply because, well, it works!

Clearly #1 can work for individual property owners who are going it alone, but #2 requires the assistance of a third party. Also, the version of #2 that we use pretty much requires payment upfront with only a few exceptions made by our property owners. What you do depends on your situation

Conclusion – Nothing’s perfect (yet, anyway)
If you have the brand equity, you can probably pull of going it alone, otherwise increase your brand equity

If you own a home that has a 2 year waiting list and rents for hundreds of thousands of dollars, then you probably have sufficient brand equity to require payment whenever and however you’d like. For the rest of us we can either try to find an escrow source or raise our brand equity. Here are things you should look for in either solution:

Escrow agencies – Are they licensed? It’s nearly universal that to escrow payments, a company needs to be licensed. While some websites claim to be “payment processors” they’re still engaging in real estate transactions and if they’re not licensed but still hold payments in escrow then they’re not legal and your payment may not be guaranteed. Do your research and ask to see proof of licensing! Also, escrow payments needs to be secured and separate from the rest of the company’s accounts. Make sure that your provider has the proper account setup or else you may not be safe! To optimize your chances make sure that your provider takes all forms of payment!
Raising Brand equity – These are simple things but often overlooked:

Get a website - Even one page is sufficient. Make sure your photo and contact information is prominently displayed. Disclose your address so guests know you have a real home and can verify you on Google Maps. Even better you can often embed a map with your location prominently displayed. Make your mailing address MATCH the address listed online. Not all of these things are always comfortable or possible but do your best!
Add credit card support – If you only take cash, you’re saving 2.5 – 5% but you’re absolutely isolating a large group of guests. Add these payment types and prominently display them on your website. Guests often know they can turn to their credit card provider if there was an issue with your property. If someone wants to pay in cash or by check, great, you’re getting the best of both worlds.
Get reviewed – Reviews from real people, help build trust but in this day and age it’s hard to prove reviews are real. Services like Yelp or google places can be helpful but they haven’t been friendly to individual properties in the past. If anything it’s great to get a facebook page up and have your guests review you there, then link to these reviews from your website. Real people, real reviews done easy!
Align yourself with a trusted brand – Many owners use vacation rental listing sites to “prove” they’re trustworthy but from a guest’s perspective payments are still going directly to you. If you don’t do the things listed above you won’t benefit much from the new brand. Some brands are more trusted than others. We’d like to think that guests trust us the most because we guarantee every booking, but we’re escrow agents so we can do that.
Be professional – Guests aren’t dumb, but scammers are. As a result, just being professional and prompt can work wonders for your property and help you stand out from the pack. That said, a website or listing riddled with spelling errors and typos can knock you down big time. In this day and age, you also can’t rely on simple text advertisements so being professional means either listing on a professional site or making your own (see above).

Making our solution better (warning: self promotion follows!)
So far we’ve got the escrow down but we’re still looking to improve

We know we’ll be successful when our property owners are successful. Right now, our solution is the most trusted in the industry because we guarantee our owners will get paid and guarantee our guests will get what they paid for. Not only is our solution safe, but it’s also easy. Still,we’re in the process of exploring how to make our system more flexible while maintaining the same level of trust. We’re also out to improve some of the little things we mention above such as increasing payment options, making our review system better, and possibly adding some customization to how guests pay. If you ever have an idea on what we can do to get better send them on to us at support@gamedayhousing.com.

Likewise, if you are interested in joining the GamedayHousing.com family email us at support@gamedayhousing.com or visit GamedayHousing.com/owners to learn more about our service and what we do!

NOTE: Just after this was posted on November 12, 2010, Chris fielded a call from guests interested in booking a home in Iowa City for September 16, 2011. These guests wanted to pay some portion upfront and the remainder by July 1, 2011, otherwise they would take the chance of the home booking up and wait until the spring to book. Look for an update in a micro post coming soon!

Chris Brusznicki is the CEO and Co-Founder of GamedayHousing.com, which is a vacation rental website for sports fans, by sports fans.

Thanks to UrbanDaddy.com

Chris Brusznicki — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 19:45:17 +0000

This is a quick one – UrbanDaddy.com helps it’s readers find awesome things to do in big cities and across the country. Somehow we made their list of things to check out this football season and we’re very appreciative. If you have time take a look at their site here: UrbanDaddy.com.

Our favorite excerpt:

“Basically, it’s like booking a hotel, only the hotel is a private home somewhere near the game.” We’d add that our property owners have nicer homes than any hotel in town but that’d be pushing it!Read more: http://www.urbandaddy.com/ntl/travel/11537/Gameday_Housing_Renting_a_Private_Home_Near_the_Game_National_NTL#ixzz12GmECeyE

Milestone time – $1,000,000 in bookings as of August 2010!

Chris Brusznicki — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 16:31:23 +0000

We’ve done it! The GamedayHousing.com team is pleased to announce that as of August of 2010 we surpassed the $1,000,000 mark for bookings! That is a HUGE testament to our team of property owners who continue to provide a fantastic experience to their guests and to our team here for making the process of booking a vacation rental as easy as possible. With 2011 schedules coming out for college football we anticipate that we’ll triple this number for 2011!

Here are some other exciting stats from the summer that we’d like to share:

Number of owners and guests signed up at GamedayHousing.com: 1,500

Number of listings: 300+ in 31 cities and growing!

In other exciting news we also have started booking up properties for other events such as Lollapalooza, NASCAR, basketball, and marathons. We’d love to expand to the Kentucky Derby and select NFL markets. As always if you know of a friend who is interested in working with us please direct them to me personally and I’d be happy to help them out chris at gamedayhousing dot com

Thanks again to our property owners who are so great to work with and to all of our guests for making this possible!

-Chris and the GamedayHousing.com Team

How to start a business with $100 courtesy of the Toilet Paper Entrepreneur blog

Chris Brusznicki — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:34:24 +0000

Do you have an entrepreneurial dream of your own? The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur is a font of Entrepreneurial knowledge that can absolutely help you out. We recently were privileged to contribute to the blog by answering the question, “What would you do with $100 to start a business?”

We’re a completely self-funded business and actually spent less than $100 to get started so we have strong feelings on the topic. Check out what we and a few other great entrepreneurs had to say here: http://www.toiletpaperentrepreneur.com/blog/how-to-start-a-business-with-100.00

Tailgating at the Grove – Ole Miss

Jean — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 10:14:06 +0000

Tailgating Across the Nation: First Destination

Ole Miss — “The Grove”

Our search for the greatest tailgating college in the nation begins in Oxford, Mississippi at the University of Mississippi, more commonly and fondly known as Ole Miss. For further insight, we sought out one of the most insightful tailgaters that we knew – Dave Lamm, creator of Tailgatingideas.com, avid football fan, and writer of the Bucket List for Tailgaters (to read the complete Bucket List for tailgaters, visit: http://www.tailgatingideas.com/bucket-list/).

“Still exuding the southern charm of an antebellum Hollywood movie, The Grove at Ole Miss is tailgating that time forgot,” says Dave Lamm. The Grove deviates greatly from the typical tailgating scene as fans are surrounded by white table-clothed dinner tables with candelabras under tents, beautiful women in sundresses and pearls, and men in oxfords and ties. The place and the people are the epitome of southern hospitality. The smells of southern barbeque still smoking in gigantic smokers from the night before spur on the appetites of hungry fans.

Gates open to the tailgating grounds at 4 AM and like clockwork, fans are already lined up and ready to party for the next 14 hours until kick off. What truly stands out with tailgating at The Grove, however, isn’t the outward appearance of the tailgaters, but rather the heart and passion that fans throw into tailgating. “These fans literally believe that if they do not tailgate hard enough, their team will not play as well,” Lamm said. So for six or seven home games a year, these fans continue to gather in The Grove, united in their love for the Ole Miss rebels, ready to tailgate their team to victory.

Hotty Toddy! GamedayHousing brings vacation rentals to Oxford Mississippi!

Jean — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:44:10 +0000

June 29, - Oxford, MS – GamedayHousing.com, the number sports vacation rental service in America, has recently announced its movement into the vacation rental market in Oxford, Mississippi by listing a stunning four bedroom house only three miles away from Ole Miss’s stadium. This beautiful and well furnished house is located on Logan Lee Loop and is the first of many houses that GamedayHousing.com plans to add to its collection of Gameday Homes across the nation.

GamedayHousing.com provides guests with the ability to stay in its vacation rental homes located across America at lower rates than local hotels, while offering all the benefits of being at home. These vacation homes offer really good alternatives to overpriced Oxford Hotels at a greater value – take a look at some testimonials here.

The new house on Logan Lee Loop joins the collection of GamedayHousing.com homes that are able to offer football fans an affordable, comfortable, and luxurious place to stay on game days. These vacation homes also are able to offer fans the ability to keep all of their friends and family together while staying right by the stadium with, in many cases, additional amenities such as gas grills, huge flat-panel TVs, and huge patios. Rebels fans love staying at GamedayHousing vacation homes because they are able to have the best gameday experience possible at the best value!

Insurance with Matt Bennett

aj — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 19:12:29 +0000

A common concern with our homeowners is something along the lines of “What happens if my house gets damaged by renters?!” While security deposits and other deterrents are helpful, the most important safeguard to this is the same safeguard people use with all of their valuable items from cars to cell phones—insurance.

In order to gain some insight in what homeowners should look for while looking to protect their homes, we talked to an insurance salesman for J.L. Hubbard Insurance and Bonds, Matt Bennett, a fellow Domer from Illinois. Here are some highlights from our conversation.

GDH Blog: What are some risks involved with renting out a house?
It’s undeniable that when two parties don’t really know each other there’s going to be some risk involved, especially when renting out a home. Matt says “issues can include physical damages to the property itself as well as the liability associated with bodily injuries sustained on that property.”

GDH Blog: How can one minimize risk?
Matt explains that “owner[s] should carry liability insurance to protect himself/herself from bodily injury or property damage claims sustained as a result of their home ownership.” Additionally, insurance can be purchased for anything else of value (i.e. furnishings) that they’d want to protect.

The next step, according to Matt, is to “ensure that the lease agreement used during the term of the rental outlines a requirement that the tenant carry liability insurance.” This covers property damage/bodily harm as a result of occupying the property during the lease. The owner will only be liable for injuries if the owner’s actions/choices contributed to it (think Sheldon Brown clobbering Reggie Bush…yeah not something an owner should not do) .

GDH Blog: What Should You Look For?
Matt noted a couple steps outlined below on how to look for the right insurance policy for you.

Identify key details on the property that you want to cover (do you really want to insure that $10 homemade pong table?)
Provide home’s value, construction type, area, key updates, etc.

Select a trusted insurance rep. Make sure he/she understands what exactly your house will be used for (Lionel Hutz pictured below, is NOT a good choice…oh wait he’s a lawyer…still not a good choice…)

GDH Blog: How Much Does it Cost?
Everyone’s always concerned about costs, and you should be too. After all, you’re in this business to see some green flowing in, not out. However, Matt explains that “var(ies) substantially.” More valuable homes cost more to be insured, while deductible levels and liability protection limits also affect costs.

GDH Blog: How Do You Find Insurance?
As Matt mentioned before, you need to “find a trusted insurance agent.” Agents can provide you with all the answers you may need regarding any type of insurance you may want for your home. You also have to make sure that that the agent understands that you will be renting out your home in order to find the right policy for you.

Further Assistance
So, if you have any other questions regarding insurance, Matt is a certified insurance broker who works for J.L. Hubbard Insurance and Bonds. He can be reached at mbennett@jlhubbard.com.

Badgers across the nation find new homes in Madison with GamedayHousing.com

Jean — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 14:38:04 +0000

June 24th, 2010 – Madison, WI – The premier service in the sports vacation rental market, GamedayHousing has expanded into Madison, Wisconsin by adding a beautiful 4 bedroom house, a mere 18.4 miles away from Wisconsin’s campus. GamedayHousing.com predicts that the beautiful house on North State Road will help GamedayHousing.com emerge into the Madison vacation rental market, providing Wisconsin fans the benefits of staying at a GamedayHousing home.

GamedayHousing.com offers renters with homes across the nation that offer guests and visitors the opportunity to stay in a place that provides all the comforts of their own house with the additional benefits of living extremely close to their favorite stadium. Other benefits of these vacation rental homes include being able to accommodate large groups of families and friends at lower rates than hotels in the area, while providing guests with more comforts and amenities of an actual home.

The 4 bedroom house on Westlawn Drive will now allow Vandy fans to reap the benefits of staying in a GamedayHousing home – just minutes away from Wisconsin Stadium. Fans can unwind and lay back in a spacious home with all of their friends and family – enjoying lower rates and the feel of being able to eat and have their pre-game festivities in a private home. GamedayHousing.com’s Madison Vacation Rentals helps Vandy fans have the best possible college football experience at the best value!

Designing for the future

Chris Brusznicki — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 16:35:54 +0000

My last year in the Army I served at a research laboratory where we literally were tasked with designing the future of military hardware. Though my time there was short I learned that design is a process that’s tough to get right – whether you’re building life saving body armor or a website to help fans find homes to rent on gamedays you never know how your design is going to stand up to real life use. At Gameday today our design team is small and nimble (though always outnumbered and forever outgunned).

Design as a group, however, can easily be done wrong. My friend Bob, who is often confused for Doc Brown for his wild eyed looks and track record as a talented Bose engineer, drove this home for me by asking me a rather profound question following a committee meeting:

Bob: “Hey Chris, What’s a camel?”
Me: “Hah Bob – let me have it.”
Bob: “A horse designed by committee!”

If you’ve ever sat in a design committee meeting you can easily imagine your co-workers (often not designers) talking over one another about colors, features, and more – all the while missing the big picture. Next thing you know the animal that was supposed to be fleet of foot and love carrots can go for weeks without water, smells bad, and spits at its enemies!

We bring this up because we’re trying to design the future here at Gameday and because of our size we don’t get slowed down by the bureaucratic non-sense that plagues larger organizations. That said, one small change to a pixel at ebay can have profound impacts across the site and organization. So how does large scale design get done right?

Boagworld, which is a great podcast for web entrepreneurs, designers, and developers has what we think is the right take on the process. If you’ve never heard the musings of Paul & Marcus then you’re truly missing out! Check out the link to get more of their story.

Recently the Boagworld team commented on the tortures of “Design by Committee.” Anyone who has ever worked at a large corporation or institution can share in the horrors of “steering committee participation.” Though we don’t have a steering committee we do believe in a few good principles that any size organization can employ:

Involve various stakeholders early on in the brainstorming process – your users, employees, designers, and developers all have key input that is valuable to how something should “work.” You should get this input up front and get one on one feedback throughout the project rather than just when you’re “close to finishing.”
Do lots of user testing – This is something we could admittedly do better during testing, but we’re pressed for time so we often just conduct cursory tests with a small handful of users. To compensate we push little changes out to our site frequently as see how they do with real users. We then standby to make quick changes to respond to the changes made. This works for us because we have a lot of free space on the site and not many pages to worry about. That said, as we’ve grown we’ve seen how we can’t move as rapidly as we used to!
Ask and ye shall receive – Don’t ask open ended questions unless you want everything and anything to storm through. If you’re looking for copy errors in content ask for folks to look just through the text and look for spelling or grammatical errors. If you want style input ask for folks to focus on place and color. Of course open ended questions are great but they too need to be focused. Rather than ask “What did you think?” use a thoughtful question such as “What was it like creating the listing? What did you feel?” or “Would you change anything about the process on this page?” You can always get more open ended but if you’re a small business you can suffer from paralysis by analysis. Focus on what you need and then ask some really open ended questions last.

So why are we writing this what do we have in store?

Lots of stuff but for now we’re just making it easier to use the current site we have and we’re focused on evolution rather than revolution. At the top of my list are the following:

Usability – Make it easier to sign up and do what you’d like to do (list or rent a home)
Content – Users want to know exactly who we are so we’re trying to help folks learn just that by adding some about us pages and stuff like this blog
Expanding strategically – We know folks want to rent homes for golf, NFL events, NASCAR and more. We’re working on it!

If you want to help us test any of the above please let us know – just shoot an email to chris@gamedayhousing.com and we’ll get you on the testing team!