Mike Bayer
This episode is brought to you by Lodgify. Lodgify is your all-in-one platform for managing and scaling your short-term rental business, from easily publishing your own bookable website to managing all your day-to-day tasks just in one place.

Mike Bayer
Whether you're a seasoned host or starting out, Lodgify can simplify your journey to building your thriving vacation rental business. And with Lodgify, you can accept direct bookings and payments, sync your reservations across all major booking sites, and automate your workflows, helping you save time while increasing your revenue.

Mike Bayer
It's the smart way to grow your business. Keep your guests satisfied and enjoy what you do. So get started today and make sure you use the code VRF10, that's VRF10, for 10% off your professional and ultimate yearly plans when signing up.

Heather Bayer
We like to cover topics on this show that aren't typically heard on the majority of podcasts, maybe because they just aren't the most popular topics. So today we're not talking about dynamic pricing or direct booking tactics or design hacks. In this episode, I'll be exploring the topic of human trafficking in short-term rentals with Catherine Ratcliffe. This is an important episode, and I know every listener will find it of value.

Heather Bayer
This is the Vacation Rental Success Podcast, keeping you up-to-date with news, views, information, and resources on this rapidly changing short-term rental business. I'm your host, Heather Bayer, and with 25 years of experience in this industry, I'm making sure you know what's hot, what's not, what's new, and what will help make your business a success.

Heather Bayer
Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Vacation Rental Success podcast. This is your host, Heather Bayer, and I'm super excited to be back with you once again as we head well into the month of June now. My goodness, this year is going so fast. We've just completed our first effort at the THRIVE Training System. The videos are all complete, the workbook's complete. It's all ready to roll. It's gone out to our advisory board and to our beta group of property management companies, who are testing it out for us. We are so excited about this.

Heather Bayer
It feels really odd, actually. I've had some downtime. I took three days off with a friend who came to visit me from Vancouver, but she's, in fact, an old school friend. We were in the same boarding school for six years between the ages of 10 and 16 in England, and I haven't seen her for 53 years. It was so nice to take three full days away and do nothing but talk about childhood stuff, which, as you can imagine, going back that amount of time, involves a lot of digging around in the memories and in the old boxes of photos as well. It's been fun.

Heather Bayer
Anyway, here I am, back to work again. We're working on some new material now for THRIVE, which will be coming out over the next few months. So when we launch it big time in the fall, there is going to be a lot of material available. So you will see some promotions that we're doing for webinars that my business partner and my son, Mike, is running. Please come along to those webinars. You'll be able to find out more about the THRIVE Training System and why we believe it is revolutionary in training and education in this industry. So I'll put some information on the Show Notes for that.

Heather Bayer
But in today's episode, in fact, we're talking about something that is covered in the course, and we're talking about human trafficking. It's a global issue, and it is one that's impacting our business. Let me share a couple of headlines from the last six months or so. This is across the world, because from the Brussels Times in Belgium, I read, The cities of Antwerp and Ghent in the Ledeberg Province [actually the Province of East Flanders] are looking into how to tackle human trafficking in private homes and tourist lodgings, specifically concerning sex workers, asylum seekers, and migrant workers.

Heather Bayer
Then from my own neck of the woods here in Ontario, and this is from The Globe and Mail, one of our national newspapers last October, a Mississauga - Mississauga is a city in Ontario - a Mississauga, Ontario man is facing charges, including assault by suffocation, forcible confinement, and sexual assault after police in London, Ontario, say a woman was victimized over the course of nearly a year, culminating in a violent incident at an Airbnb last month.

Heather Bayer
Then from the Montgomery County Police Department in Maryland in a public service PDF which says, Every day, thousands of employees working in the hospitality industry, witness indicators of human trafficking and fail to report it, all too often because they don't recognize the signs when they see them.

Heather Bayer
So last year at the VRMA conference in Orlando, Catherine Ratcliffe, who's a benefits consultant for short-term rental operators, spoke about the rising numbers of incidences of human trafficking in short-term rentals. She talked about how to recognize the signs and to get ahead of potential issues. She also discussed labor trafficking, which can occur right under our noses within our own businesses.

Heather Bayer
In this episode, Catherine is going to share what we can do as professional hosts and managers to recognize those warning signals and signs that something might be going on in your rental properties or even within your workforce. So without further ado, let's go on over to my chat with Catherine.

Heather Bayer
So I am super happy to have back with me once again, Catherine Ratcliffe. I was going to say hot off the conference that we all went to in Banff. How many months ago was that, Catherine? It seems like forever ago.

Catherine Ratcliffe
I know, but it was only about five, six weeks ago. It wasn't that long ago, but yeah.

Heather Bayer
Is that all?

Catherine Ratcliffe
That's all.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, because we went... You'd already planned to go from Banff to Boise for the VR Nation Conference. It was everybody in Banff saying, I'll see you in two weeks or next week even in Boise. And I went home and I thought, my FOMO is going to get way too much if I don't go to Boise as well. And that was a good conference, too. So just two great events. Yours was just outstanding. And I've talked about it to so many people. I'm glad that you are planning a repeat for 2025, and I'm not going to talk about it too much because I'm sure there will be plenty more information coming over the next month. Let's get summer over, right?

Catherine Ratcliffe
Right. Exactly.

Heather Bayer
But anyway, thanks for joining me again, Catherine, because in this episode, we're going to be talking about human trafficking, which includes sex trafficking, labor trafficking. And for those of you listening, you may think, well, that's never going to happen in my vacation rental, in my location. But in fact, when I was doing the research for this episode and I was looking at news clips and some media reports, and it is everywhere. It really is everywhere. It's not something that you just see in particular areas. I've uncovered several news reports of things that were happening in Toronto. So for me, pretty close to home.

Heather Bayer
But let me start with asking you to share a little bit about your background for those who haven't listened to previous podcasts, because you are a property owner and you are very active in this industry, and maybe there's a little bit more information in those previous podcast, so I'll put links to those on the Show Notes. But for those who perhaps haven't heard about you before, can you share a bit of your background in the industry and also why the issue of human trafficking is such a relevant topic for you?

Catherine Ratcliffe
Absolutely. I'm originally from Canada, which is why I did focus on the CanStays Conference. I moved to Florida a number of years ago, 27 now, to be exact. I have been a large group employee benefits consultant and very active from a health care perspective. I worked a lot with the Medicaid clinics in the state of Florida. And so there's a lot that you see when you go through claims data, when you interact with various populations across the state, across the country.

Catherine Ratcliffe
The issue of human trafficking came up on a number of different fronts. There were regulations that changed here. We started to really get a campaign going in the state because our statistics are terrible. We're number three in the country for human trafficking. And as part of that is with the number of ports we have. It has to do with some of the geographical stuff, from a tourism perspective, transient nature of the state. But it's not a statistic that anybody in the state is very proud of. And so prior to Super Bowl in, I believe it was 2020, if I was to lose which year was in versus the year that it's touted for....

Heather Bayer
Hey, don't ask me. I mean, I'm Canadian through and through, and Super Bowl just goes over the top of my head. Now, Stanley Cup, that's something else.

Catherine Ratcliffe
The state did a big campaign on human trafficking leading up to the Super Bowl. Because any time you have those types of compression events, that's when you can see an increase in any crime activity, not just human trafficking. So I was going through professionally some things, and then personally, some things as well, where human trafficking was very present in a the way that I didn't expect it to be. Deborah Labi posted the link to the Florida course. It was something I was just following her on LinkedIn. I had met her at Damian's [Sheridan] Book Direct Conference in Miami, and I thought, I'll take this course. Then as soon as I opened it and realized it was Florida, I thought, What the heck is going on? I'm a licensed SHRM [Society for Human Resources Management], which is the HR instructor for the state of Florida and I've never seen this course before. And yet it's happening for all employers across the state. This was a huge issue. They were seeing more and more instances of either you had team members who were victims, and labor is often higher than the sex trafficking because labor is much easier, it's much more pervasive, and it's less stigmatized, too.

Catherine Ratcliffe
Then we were also seeing victims showing up on claim reports. We were seeing issues coming up that several of my CEOs wrote articles about where they were having interventions at their place of work, where they recognized the signs of something that was off, and they were able to help somebody. And so, of course, I also have short-term rentals, where this is an issue for me. The state also required that all cleaners, whether you were in the hotel industry or you were in the short-term rental industry, were required to have your cleaners go through this annual training as well. And so I work with... I know Melanie Griffin from the DBPR [Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation] here, which is where you get your licensing through. We talked a lot about those campaigns and the different values behind it.

Catherine Ratcliffe
The state's course is very good. There's a few pieces that I think from an employer perspective that if I were to rewrite the course that I would include as well. But I think the biggest challenge that you have with human trafficking is as soon as you say that, people get turned off from learning more because they're afraid. And it's not like learning about fire prevention or learning about safety with swimming pools and that sort of thing, because it is so horribly dark and you don't want to confront the evils of human nature, and that can come about.

Catherine Ratcliffe
That was why it also got brought up at the CanStays Conference, why I asked Minister Le Blanc to come and to speak about Canada's commitment to preventing human trafficking across short-term rentals, and in all industries as well, because I think it is important that everybody recognizes that it can happen anywhere to anybody at any time, and there's no person that is safe from it. Some people will say, Well, you live in a really nice neighborhood. You're in a gated community, and it's not possible that that could happen to you. And your children go to a private school or what have you. It can happen to anybody. It happens to disabled people. It's constantly something that you need to be aware of and educating people on both elements, particularly that labor piece, where it can become so simplified in how it takes place. When you say that human trafficking label, you envision people in cages. That very rarely, certainly it happens, but it very rarely happens that that is the way you are faced with it day to day in your normal course of activities.

Catherine Ratcliffe
That's the goal of really helping people understand this does happen in a far more, I would say palatable but pervasive way. It's not scary to take the training. It's not scary to learn these issues. There are very basic things that you can do to protect your little corner of the world.

Heather Bayer
We often think when we're talking human trafficking, we think it's sex trafficking. But you're talking a lot here about the labor trafficking. We do a lot of work down in Gulf Shores, along the Panhandle Coast and down into Florida, where a lot of the cleaners, English is not their first language. English may not be a language that they have at all. So let's unravel a bit. How prevalent is this in our business? You see it a lot more. You're talking about Florida. And I say I've seen the reports in Toronto, but that's more on the sex trafficking side. Let's cover this labor trafficking for a moment. Can you give me some examples?

Catherine Ratcliffe
Yeah. So the first one is really being mindful of how you pay somebody, right? Because, again, you think about it from a perspective of somebody that is confined or in cages or what have you. The most common way that this comes about is through the payment process. So as things have developed from a technology perspective, it used to be that people were paid in cash and people were paid by paper check, and then it started with direct deposit, and then now we've got E-transfers and all these sorts of things. One of the things that comes into play when you deal with individuals who are newer to any area or any country is that their bankability is a little bit more challenged. They may not have the documentation to go and open a bank account. Immediately, I need to pay you. You don't have the proper documentation to be able to get a bank account, and so you need to be paid in a different format. Sometimes that's perfectly understandable. It's acceptable. You just moved here, what have you. But where does that money go? As an employer, you need to ensure that you are paying wages to the person that you are contracted to pay for this service, whether that's a contract relationship with a landscaper or a cleaner.

Catherine Ratcliffe
A lot of those regulations about whether they fall under a contract status or an employee status changed in March of this year in the US. There's a lot that people need to be mindful of with those regulations as well to make sure that they don't have a compliance issue. But that aside, you need to make sure that if I am paying Heather Bayer, that that money is going to Heather Bayer. So I need to perform some form of verification that this money goes directly to you. So if you just give me a routing number or an e-transfer account, a PayPal account, I need to do my due diligence, that that belongs to you, that you have access to that. Once it goes from there, then it's a secondary level of responsibility, because you've done your initial due diligence.

Catherine Ratcliffe
In the US, we're required to do verifications to make sure that you're legally allowed to perform work here, and that includes on a temporary foreign worker visa. It's a H-1N visa. And that is almost a form of legalized trafficking, where I'm not allowed to go work somebody else. I'm required based on my visa status that I have to work for you. And so that's something that the state is looking very closely at. What happens if that's an unsafe situation, what happens if you have complaints against that employer, and now your immigration status is put into jeopardy.

Catherine Ratcliffe
Those are very simple ways that that can take place. It happens also when you get into what I would consider more of a white collar environment, too. And this is where it's really important to educate children or people that are going into the workforce to understand what's going on. When you have recruiters that come in and they will tell you, I'll help you find a job. Here's what I'm going to do for you. I'm going to organize this placement, this internship, what have you. And they say that they will take a portion of your pay. And so I had this happen with somebody where they were told that they would get this position within a certain employer, and they were contacted by the employer as a recruiter. But what they did to this team member that they were to onboard was they said that they were going to charge them a fee as well because based on their relationship with the employer, they would get them a higher rate of pay, and that that new employee would get that adjustment over the course of their career.

Catherine Ratcliffe
If you're standard rate of pay was 50,000, I'm going to get you 55 because of my relationship, you're going to pay me that 5,000 that first year. But every cost of living adjustment, every promotion, everything is going to be based on the fact that I got you $5,000 more out of the gate. And their sales pitch is, I understand you don't have the job yet. You'll just pay me directly through your payroll. Here's my routing number and my account number. You just pay me by paycheck. That is also a form of trafficking. And you as the employer need to make sure because the assumption from an employer, that doesn't flag anything for an employer because you just assume it's a savings account or something else that they're doing, but it's not. You need to make sure every bank account, every dollar that you're paying, that that is going to that individual.

Catherine Ratcliffe
The other signs that you look for is, like I said in the beginning, if they have the documentation. They are supposed to be able to provide some form of documentation to say that I am actually Catherine Ratcliffe. For all sorts of other reasons, if they're driving a vehicle, you need to know that they have a valid driver's license, you need to have information for insurance, all of those types of things, to know that this is who this person is.

Catherine Ratcliffe
If I come in and I don't have control of those documents, that is something that would be a red flag for you. Conversely, you as the employer need to have standard operating procedures that make sure that you don't end up unknowingly in what is perceived as a trafficking situation. So again, I need to get this documentation from you. You give me the documentation I get busy. There's an emergency at a property. I forget to give it back to you. I think about it at nine o'clock at night. I come in the next day. You're not at work because it's your day off. All of a sudden, I've gone three weeks and I haven't given you back your documentation, you can report me, because I have withheld your documentation. That team member may feel like they're all of a sudden in this situation where they didn't get their documents back. Why didn't they get their documents back? You want to make sure that you are checking your procedures with your team to make sure that they're also returning those documents.

Catherine Ratcliffe
Now, from a guest perspective, and I would say also for all third-party vendors, in your contracts, you can request that they agree that they are also going through human trafficking training with their team members and that they do not participate or condone trafficking. If they are at your properties and they see something, that they will report it to you the same way they would anything else, like vehicles on fire or it looks like the window's broken or something like that, that they would have the same type of procedures because sometimes they'll see something. They're at the property at a different time than you are.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, can I just go back a bit? If you're using a third-party, let's say third-party cleaning cleaning company. I was talking to a manager in Florida the other day, and she said there were so many new small cleaning companies just popping up here and there. We were talking about the need for cleaners to be trained in hospitality and responsibility. That's my question. If you're employing a company, how do you know that their workers are being used in the right way and it's a professional above board company?

Catherine Ratcliffe
There's a couple of things that you do. One, you would make sure that in your agreement with them that they say that they've done all verification. You want to make sure, again, whether they're required to be licensed or insured, that they've done background checks, that the people are the people they say they are sending them into your home. You don't need to say because you want to make sure that they're not being trafficked. You also want to make sure that there's no criminal activity coming in where you're potentially going to have your properties robbed later. For all sorts of reasons. You can always fall back on insurance and say that your insurance company requires that they provide this level of certification to you. That's just a simple authorization and verification. They're not going to give you the employee-level data because that would be a data breach, but they can include that within the contract.

Catherine Ratcliffe
Then you would look for certain things. One of my clients, what they noticed from a labor perspective, the individual when he came in, he had these rashes all all over his arms, and that he was working on a farm. He was a laborer, and they were not giving him proper protective gear. They were not adhering to any of the OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] safety standards that we have to comply with. He was being exposed to pesticides and things that he wasn't supposed to. He was in inhumane living conditions. You see things like that.

Catherine Ratcliffe
Again, not everything is automatically human trafficking. What you're looking for is a pattern, of a sign, a person who doesn't make eye contact, a person who doesn't have control. They're not driving themselves to and from places. They're being dropped off, they're being picked up, they don't have access to a cell phone. As there starts to be barriers in your communication with these individuals, so when you have a cleaner, how do you let the cleaner know, Hey, there's a late checkout, or, Hey, report an issue to me. Normally, those are done through various apps, whether you're using something like Turno or Breezeway or what have you. You have a system that they let you know that there's problem. If they don't have access to that, if I need to get in touch with the cleaner to say, Hey, I've got toilet paper being delivered tomorrow, because something happened. Every property operates slightly differently, but you should be able to be able to be in communication with that cleaner, even if it's a third party, because, again, there are things that come up where all of a sudden I need to let you know this is happening.

Catherine Ratcliffe
If that's a problem, that's a red flag. So there are just basics to how your communication goes and each time there's an opposition to, Well, no, you can't have the cleaner's phone number, or the cleaner doesn't have a phone, the cleaner isn't allowed to be there by themselves. There are things that are going to lead to additional questions that would give you pause to say, this just doesn't feel right.

Heather Bayer
So how does somebody go about reporting this? Should every company have a standard operating procedure that says, if you see something that's untoward, something that doesn't feel right, this is what you do? Because I know from my own experience that standard operating procedures are something that you really wish you... You know you should have, you really wish you did have, but most often you don't have.

Catherine Ratcliffe
Right. Yeah. And sometimes it's not the hottest fire until it is. It's always difficult with relationships that are already established to look at them and say, I wonder if they're really operating the way that they say they are. It's difficult to go backwards and to say, I've worked with you for the last 10 years, but now all of a sudden I need all of this information.

Catherine Ratcliffe
It's also easy to say, Well, if I use, for example, a large national pest control company, I mean, why would I have any question about what they're doing versus somebody who's local? A lot of this actually hides more so in those bigger firms, because it's easier to get by with those big names. Now, they're working harder. I worked for a company, had 3,500 employees. They never did banking verification. Not only did they not do banking verification, they didn't do any dependent verification. I could have added 17 neighbors onto my plan, and they wouldn't have known if they were my children or not. Those are things that you want to look at, too. It's not the size of the organization. It really comes down to the procedures and the policies that they adhere to.

Catherine Ratcliffe
So the first thing you want to do is to conduct a training course yourself so you know what you're talking about. Because once you get into something as pervasive as human trafficking, a false report is worse than anything. Because you can have a very normal situation. My mother lived her whole life and didn't drive, and that didn't mean that she was being trafficked. There are all kinds of reasonable explanations as to why certain things happen, but looking for certain patterns. The easiest way to start is with your own team members, those that you actually have control over where you can say, listen, effective January 1, we are going to do this, and we're doing this for your safety and for ours, and put posters up so that nobody feels weird about it. And it's there for their family's benefit, too. They're learning something that they will want their children to know, their loved ones to know that these are things to look out for. Safety tips about going out to a parking lot at night. What happens if you're the last person in the building? What happens if you're cleaning on your own and it's dark? What do you do about locations on your phones and things like that to keep you safe.

Catherine Ratcliffe
As long as you're coming at it from a place that we're trying to protect you, then it doesn't feel as much like we're trying to find out if something's going on with you. And I think you also have to be very sensitive to the fact that there are very likely trafficking victims that are one degree of separation away from you. They could be your employee, they could be a loved one of your employee, they could be a neighbor. It's not always that's happening within your place of employment or your vacation rental. It can also be happening next door. I have long-term renters on the other side of me, and it's a constant parade of different people back and forth through there. So you want to make sure your lens is all a 360 degree view of everything so that your cleaners know, Hey, when you're going to that property, if something looks weird next door, those people are a little off. We want to make sure that we're prepared to take notice of things and to file a report.

Catherine Ratcliffe
Filing that report is really reporting it into the various hot lines. Each country has a hotline, some states... Florida is just rolling out their own state line. That's good because it's something that I think when you deal with any of these issues, the more sensationalized they become, the more media attention they get, and for good or bad, everybody's looking for that. They'd rather have a sting that involves 40 people, and ideally, people that you wouldn't expect, like principals, teachers, religious organizations, that's what they're looking for as opposed to the unemployed person next door, and it's just one person.

Catherine Ratcliffe
But we're trying to be good stewards of our community. Whether it's one person or it's 100 people, we don't want that happening in our place of employment to our team member or to our neighbors or to our property owners. So that's where it's really important to work and to get involved from an advocacy perspective with those local community partners, your police departments, your chambers of commerce, to make sure that they know that you're invested in protecting the community as well, because this all builds those communication blocks for the longer term goals that we are here to help with advancing the right narrative about the areas that we operate in.

Catherine Ratcliffe
For Florida, AirBnB donated $100,000 for human trafficking education for the state of Florida. They were the only ones from our industry, they're the only ones that go to the various campaign kickoffs and fundraisers for human trafficking prevention. Well, I think it's important that those of us that operate in this space also add our voices to that, because we don't want it to, especially for those that aren't on AirBnB, that are booking exclusively directly, or are using other platforms that are not Airbnb. If Airbnb is the only voice for the industry, that's problematic as well.

Catherine Ratcliffe
So getting involved in those community organizations so that you're on the same page about what should we do, how do we make sure? Because I had an incident in one of my properties where it was very obvious that there was something untoward going on. Cleaner called me immediately. There were materials that were left behind. I called the local police department. The local police department came, they investigated, they looked at it, and they did nothing with it because they said it's just porn or whatever. It was not. It was very frustrating because I had everything for them.

Catherine Ratcliffe
I said, Here's the name. They left an hour ago. Here's all the information. And they didn't want to do anything with it. So it's important to be in that community saying, Hey, this is an issue. If you're not at the next chamber of commerce meeting talking about the fact that this happened, that you did call the police department and that they did nothing, then it's hard to get the message of the good work that you're doing out there to the residents that want to turn around and say, we're the problem. When we're trying to help. It shows up everywhere.

Heather Bayer
I'm going to take a short break just now to hear about our sponsor. We're going to be right back with more from this great interview in just a few moments.

Heather Bayer
So I'm so happy to talk to Dennis Klett from Lodgify once again. And in this section, we're going to be talking about Lodgify's website builder. Dennis, how does it compare to those of its competitors in terms of ease of use and its customization options?

Dennis Klett
Yes, our website builder is made for both single and multiple property management businesses. So if you have just one property, we optimize the website just for one property. If you have many properties, we give you a full-fledged, almost like a booking platform type of website. Super easy to get started. Takes you 10 minutes to create the site. You can customize it without needing any technical skills. You can change the design, choose layout options, add your logo, change colors, change fonts, add photos.

Dennis Klett
We create pages for you based on the property data that you add into the listing. But if you want to create custom pages, you can create as many as you want. Everything is translated into up to 32 languages. It's seamlessly integrated with Google Vacation Rentals, which is a great way to generate bookings. We offer search engine optimization tools where you can boost your visibility by adjusting your title, meta description or your URL. A domain name is included free of charge. I think we're the only ones who are offering that. You can create coupon codes or promotional codes for website bookings.

Dennis Klett
We're payment gateway agnostic. So no matter whether you're with Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, and authorize.net, we're working with all these payment gateways. There's a review system where you can collect reviews from your guests directly on your website. So that's all without needing any technical skills. If you want to go super advanced, we do offer that. You can customize your CSS. Even if you end up wanting to use a WordPress website, you can use our booking widget by copy pasting it into your WordPress website. And we actually help you also setting it up if desired.

Heather Bayer
That's all great. I know so many operators are looking to create their own websites for direct booking, and this sounds like a great option.

Heather Bayer
You've just made such an important point, and I've heard it a lot, but it's through my own networks, I hear this from people like Tyann Marcink and from people like Kerry Gibson and Philippe Pichet in Québec at Chalets Hygge, that they do go and attend these chamber of commerce meetings. They join, they become part of the community, and they make their voice heard. We were talking about it a lot over the course of the few days at the CanStays Conference, but that was more about just regulations and legislation. I hadn't really considered it in this context as well, to be out there being that voice and mobilizing people, maybe mobilizing other companies, other hosts, other managers, and bringing them together and all talking about this same thing.

Catherine Ratcliffe
Yeah, because I think every time you're engaging with a chamber of commerce or any other community entity, whether it's your Convention Visitors Bureau, or what have you, if you're able to talk about the things that you're doing and not just from an economic impact that they think of as tax dollars, because that doesn't mean anything to the individual who comes up to the town council meeting. When you're talking about the way you run your business from a financial... The number of jobs you hope to bring, the standard that you hope to provide for your team members, whether that's you want to offer health insurance, you want to offer a better rate of pay, you want to offer something that will work for people who have young children at home but also need to earn some income.

Catherine Ratcliffe
When you put forth your business model and your vision for what you do for your team, there's so many things when we get together at conferences that I hear from all kinds of people. Robin Craigan is one that talks a lot about the things that he does for his team. There are others, of course. They do amazing things for their teams.

Catherine Ratcliffe
And that's the story that when I'm sitting there thinking about, where does my child work four years from now or five years from now? If I can understand, especially in these smaller communities, there's a job opportunity that works for them. Not everybody wants to go off into a corporate career. Not everybody wants to do those types of things. There are people that, for whatever reason, they have young children at home, maybe they're more introverted, whatever it is, that they want to be able to work in a hospitality industry where they can feel really good about themselves. And it's not a minimum wage job. Most of us pay our team members very, very well. It's more than a competitive income. And I think when that message gets out in those community level partnerships, too, we're not viewed as a pariah where we're just leaching off of something that they are stewards of.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, it was interesting. There's a conversation just appeared on our Facebook group about the difference between co-hosts hosts and property managers. So co-hosting companies, which are... I mean, co-host used to be one person, so it was one person helping out one owner. But now it appears that people are advertising their co-hosting services and taking on board 20 properties, 50 properties, and more. The discussion that was coming through on the Facebook group was about, Well, now you're a property manager. Behave professionally like a property manager. That's an interesting one to take forward as we try and make that distinction between what is a co-host and what is a professional property manager. What are your thoughts on that?

Catherine Ratcliffe
I think it goes from, is this your hobby or is it your profession? I think that's true for anything that you do. The second you decide that this is no longer a hobby for you, that it's a profession that you need to treat with the respect that profession deserves. I think there's a lot of industries where people fall victim to just looking at the bottom line and not seeing the humanity behind each side of this. That's where, going back to the concept of the human trafficking, every person that you touch is a human being with dignity, no matter whether that's your cleaner, that's your landscaper, it's the guest that's coming in, every person along there needs a certain level of respect and to understand that this is their time and their value. And their value you need to protect that once you are a professional that is responsible for delivering something. When it's your hobby, and you should still always treat things with respect, but when it's your hobby, it's a smaller level of commitment that you have to that, and you're not a professional. So don't say that you're a professional if it's just a hobby.

Catherine Ratcliffe
If my hobby is to go out and ice skate, then I'm not a figure skater. And that's really important that you take it serious all across every line of that. Aside from how you do your banking, how you set up your procedures, your cleanliness standards, the way you buy your materials, it should be treated very, very professionally. And it should be a sense of, if I'm hit by a bus tomorrow, does this carry on on Sunday, on Monday? My hobby would die with me. My profession or my professional organization would continue without me because I've built it to that. I have my team, and they understand the level of service and commitment that I need and I want from them, and we hold each other accountable. If they understand that this is what the property is supposed to look like, and I'm hindering them from something by maybe not giving them enough time to turn something, or I'm allowing 20 people when the house only accommodates 10, those are the things, where well, now I'm not living up to my side of this, and that's where there can be a separation as well.

Catherine Ratcliffe
But I think you've got to be mindful of not just focusing on that bottom line. I want to pay as little as I can. I don't want to take the extra time to make sure that this person is who they say they are, that I'm paying them the way they're supposed to be. There's the legislation that just came through in the US about the contract workers and the overtime regulation. That's huge for this industry. Sue Jones and I spoke about that in Boise at VR Nation, and people need to be really mindful of that. The regulations for what triggers for overtime, you can't just label people as exempt from overtime now. You really have to do a couple of different studies and assessments to determine, to say that, Oh, no, you're an independent contractor because you're a cleaner and I don't have you as an employee. Well, you better double check what the new qualifiers are for that, because there's a lot of people...

Catherine Ratcliffe
I brought my cleaner on as soon as those regulations came in, she was resistant. She wanted to be able to have herself as a 1099 [non-employee worker]. I said, No, as of March 11th, you are my employee. Here you go. So just because of the regulations around, I provide the cleaning materials for her. 100% of her income is coming from me. I tell her when to come and go. And her job duty is a direct success or fail of my job. Based on all the testing on whether she was a contract worker or not, she failed to be a contract worker, so she had to be a W2 employee for me.

Heather Bayer
That's really interesting. Full transparency, I know very little about US labor laws. I shall look into that and put some links onto the Show Notes.

Heather Bayer
I just want to move on, Catherine, just to talk about guests. How do we know? What are the signs and signals that might indicate that a property is being used for, let's say, nefarious purposes, for purposes other than people just coming to enjoy a vacation or coming to do local business or whatever? What would you look out for? What are those signs?

Catherine Ratcliffe
So understanding that it can also be both things, right? So you talked a little bit about the stats in Toronto. I would say you also had a lot in Alberta, particularly when you went up to the oil sands. There's a lot of places where there's no hotels. And so as people are being moved from one location to the other, they're going through short-term rentals. And so it's important for both purposes to be on the lookout. Some of the signs are the same. So looking at your check in and check out procedures, how are people paying? How are people providing identification to say that I am who I am and I'm the one making the reservation and I will actually be at the property? Using systems like Safely or Superhog or any of the systems that are out there, looking at them and making sure you're going through and doing those due diligences. Personally, I like the idea of using a third party because I don't want to be responsible for that information.

Catherine Ratcliffe
Once you have information, now you fall into data requirements about privacy and breaches and that sort of thing. But all that to say, you want to go through and you want to make sure those same things. Is this your credit card? You're doing that for the most part anyways to make sure for chargeback reasons and everything else. But then whether you have cameras or you don't have cameras, you want to make sure that you've got something that alerts you to the number of people that are in the property. Because that would be a flag, of course, if there's a huge group of people. If there's a bunch of people coming and going very frequently. That was one of the things we looked at for Florida when we had these compression events, you would get a one-night or a two-night rental or even three-night. So labor, again, with something like the Taylor Swift concert or some big convention that's coming in where you only need those extra workers to come in and say, run the rickshaws back and forth to parking lots. You only need that for those three days at that volume. That's where you can get an influx of people that are going to need a place to stay. The cheapest place for them to stay to divide it all up would be a short term rental. The idea is there's no one checking you in and out at a front desk the way there is at a hotel.

Catherine Ratcliffe
What's monitoring the number of IP addresses that are coming in, the cell phones that are, whether they're connecting to your Wi-Fi or not, looking at when... If you do have a cleaner that comes and goes while they're there, or again, a landscaper, an inspector, anything like that, that's going to notice whether I make eye contact. We've had instances where it's a plumber that comes in to a dishwasher, because there's a complaint about something and somebody is unable to make eye contact or communicate or is overly.... It can go either way. All of a sudden, I'm desperately trying to get your attention because I need help and I'm trying to do it in a different way. I'm not leaving you alone because this is my one chance to make communication with somebody. It can go both directions.

Catherine Ratcliffe
Making sure that your team that goes in and out of that property, whether they're a cleaner, an inspector, a maintenance worker, a landscaper, that they're keeping their eyes out, especially around those compression events or especially around a reservation that is one night or maybe only two nights where you're standardly a little bit longer. If it's a more transient type of reservation, you would want to take a look at that and say, Could this be something?

Catherine Ratcliffe
Somebody who does not have physical control. So one thing if my husband and I are holding hands, if I'm holding the hands of my daughter across a parking lot, that's one thing. It's another thing if I'm being held at my arm, and I'm restrained and I can't go in or out, I'm not allowed by myself. Those types of things, you would see them. And you might think, I would never see that. That would never happen. But the number of times, even within my clients, that that was actually what they saw, where they didn't want to be separated from each other. The trafficker would not allow the other person into the other room to even be observed or treated by a doctor. They insisted on being with them the whole time. Those types of things, that's a flag. It really does come in as obvious as that, but we're so quick to dismiss it because we don't want to see it. It's a social blindness. I don't want to know that's happening. I don't see it. And you want it by going through the training and being aware that that can happen, that those are things that do happen, then you're just a little bit more attentive.

Catherine Ratcliffe
And then you have the process. You want to go back, you want to report back to a supervisor and say, Hey, this is what happened. Obviously, anything that is clearly egregious, you can just report directly in. But have a system where you would say, This is the number that we're going to call. This is what we're going to say. I always compare it to a wrong way driver. If I see a wrong way driver, I'm not going to go try and chase them down. I'm just going to report it to the police and let the police do what they need to do. There are still instances where, like I gave the earlier example, you need to be in communication with the police department and chamber of commerce to make sure, Hey, I'm not just a random busybody that's reporting anything and everything, that I have done this training. If you do the training every year, you'll be better about being able to see things and say things.

Heather Bayer
You talk about training, and clearly in Florida, that's available. Is it available? Have you heard that it's available in other states? Or if not, are there online versions?

Catherine Ratcliffe
The Florida course is online. Anybody can take it anywhere in the world. It's not geared specifically for Florida, so it's not going to have, We did it, we paid for it. The state pays for the course. It's free to take. It's a good educational base if you can't find one in your state. Every state is a little bit different with what they have available and at what cost. You can go to very high levels. Florida State University has a really in-depth course that you can take for $400, but you don't have to do that. I would start first by looking at what your local area offers at no cost. If you don't see something, you can always take the state's program here. If you operate at all in Florida, you have two employees in Florida, you can always go through and get recognized by the state of Florida as being part of the 100% Club by having 100% of your Florida population trained, and they will give you recognition for that. And that's one of those free low hanging fruit for anybody that has any staff in Florida. It's good to be on that list. It's not a bad thing. It's free and it's recognition that sets you apart from others. And I would recommend posting it then on your website to say you are part of the 100% club. Once the state approves it and sends back your application, you can post that.

Catherine Ratcliffe
And those are things, too, that when people are looking at your property, just like the security cameras, they're going to look for somebody who doesn't have that. So the more of those you do have, even a statement on your website that says, We do not condone or participate in any way, any form of human trafficking. We train our staff. That's a reason why I would look at somebody else's website.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, that's brilliant. Everything you've said in this conversation has been so useful and helpful. And I think for anybody listening, if they just take one small nugget away from this, then they're going to be potentially making a change for maybe somebody that they don't know. That gives me the warm and fuzzy that we all have this power to help change someone's life for the better, Just by noticing, perhaps.

Catherine Ratcliffe
It's really important to do that and to talk about it because there's so many victims out there that have moved on in their lives, but it's still a part of who they are. You will have somebody who, if that's part of their past, they will be more loyal and a better partner to you, because you're the one that has gone that extra step. It's important to them to see that you're trying to make a difference in somebody else's life. They may never tell you that that is part of their story, but statistics will tell you that there are so many people out there. It's the largest industry right now, which is horrible. 38 billion dollars in human trafficking. It's terrible. So it's such a good thing to do for your communities and for future generations, too.

Heather Bayer
That's a perfect note to end on, Catherine. Thank you so much for joining me. You are doing such amazing stuff for this industry at this minute, as was evident from the CanStays Conference. I think everybody that went away from that went away with the feeling that they were part of something bigger. And I think with this as well, getting involved means becoming part of something that's bigger. So thank you so much for being with me. I hope I'll see you soon. I hope we'll see you at VRMA or one of the other conferences coming up in the fall and the winter. And of course, I look forward to CanStays 2025. Can't wait to hear more about that.

Catherine Ratcliffe
That would be great. Thank you so much for having me on again, Heather. I really, really appreciate it.

Heather Bayer
So much useful information and information we should all know about, regardless of the size of the company or the size of business we run. This is just so important. And it's something that just has not been on our radar. I know it was never on my radar as the CEO of a property management company for 20 years. It just never crossed my mind. It certainly would now if I was running a similar company again.

Heather Bayer
We got onto a really interesting topic there, and that was the topic of co-host versus professional manager, because as I say, on my Facebook group, which if you don't know what that is, it's called The Business of Short-Term Rentals and Property Management. That Facebook group has really grown. We're now over 5,000 members. It's nicely active. Nobody ever makes a nasty comment. In the four years that it's been running, I only think I have had cause to censure one person for being unkind or unfriendly. If you have been bitten or stung by Facebook groups in the past, people get out in these groups and start trolling others. It does not happen on this group. It's simply a forum for professional discussion on the professional side of this business.

Heather Bayer
But it's interesting the discussion that started with a lady asking a question about being a co-host, and she wanted to... She had a laundry list of things that she wanted to do for hosts or for owners. She was asking the questions about this, but calling herself a co-host. Then a couple of responses came back and said, But you're not a co-host, that makes you a property manager. She was asking about the difference. I think this is an important conversation that we need to have. Certainly, Catherine brought up some very relevant points that should be included in this discussion. So I'd love it if you are not a member of that group to go and join. We'd love to have you. If you've got questions, people do jump in very, very quickly with some very relevant responses. So hoping I'll see you there.

Heather Bayer
So that's it for another week. As I mentioned right at the beginning, we have launched the beta THRIVE program. We are still looking for some beta players, if you like, beta companies who would like to come join in and get a very good pricing structure for joining the THRIVE Training Program at a very early stage. So I will put a link on the Show Notes to where you can find out about where the next introductory webinars are that Mike does, where he explains what the program is about and how you can get involved.

Heather Bayer
So that's it for me for another week. Always a pleasure to be with you. Looking forward to coming back next week, as ever. Do you know it's coming up on 11 years? No, it's coming up on 12 years since I started this podcast, and so we're rapidly heading towards 600 episodes. Quite something. I have determined that I will be around till the thousandth episode, and I may make a decision on where we go from here when I get to that point. So a long time to go. Looking forward to being with you next week.

Mike Bayer
This episode was brought to you by Lodgify, an all-in-one solution that will help you start, manage, and grow your short-term rental business. Use code VRF10 and get started today at Lodgify.com.

Heather Bayer
It's been a pleasure as ever being with you. If there's anything you'd like to comment on, then join the conversation on the Show Notes for the episode at vacationrentalformula.com. We'd love to hear from you, and I look forward to being with you again next week.

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