Heather Bayer
I'll be heading off to Vermont in early November for the Vermont Short-Term Rental Association Conference. This grew out of one person's mission to fight mounting regulatory threats to her self-built business. And it's blossomed into a really strong network of owners and managers who have come together, not only to fight those regulations, but to collaborate in raising standards and renting responsibly. In this episode, I'm talking to Julie Marks about the inspiration behind the Vermont Short-Term Rental Alliance, the importance of networking, and how small local alliances can become powerful forces.

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 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. As ever, I am super delighted to be back with you once again. And now we are going into Fall, I'm going to be heading down to Tennessee shortly to drop off my RV so I can come back and not worry about the fact that it's going to be snowing here all the way through November and December. And in January, I can just take off back down to Tennessee, pick up the RV, and head to Gulf Shores. I don't want to say cannot wait because I'm really trying to make the most of time that I have available for everything now. So I don't want to be wishing it away. But anyway, that's what I'll be doing shortly.

Heather Bayer
And usually at this time of year, when I was running a property management company, we would be getting together and talking about what happened in the summer and what we would do again and what we wouldn't do again. But there's a lot I don't miss about running a vacation rental management company. Dealing with regulatory issues is pretty much at the top of that list. There's over 350 municipalities in Ontario, and probably half of those are in areas where there are vacation rentals. But when I started the business in 2002, no one cared about rental activity. People have been renting their vacation cottages for decades, although not like they do now, which is more as a business. For them, it was just a way of creating more income or some income to pay the taxes, or build up a fund for a project such as a new deck or a dock or an extension. So they'd use the place part of the summer and rent for the rest. All very low-key. And there were rarely any issues with neighbors or with township.

Heather Bayer
The changes started after Airbnb got a foothold in the Province and investors started to buy up properties and rent quite a bit more indiscriminately. In the past, we really screened guests carefully. And it wasn't that long ago that management companies would be asking for driver's license information, home contents insurance documents, and the names and ages of every person in a group, which, of course is not something that anybody is doing these days. We first saw the signs of things to come about 10 years ago as townships began to limit rental activities and place restrictions on some residential areas in some of the resort towns. Then, as more Torontonians began to buy places for retirement and move into them, and that's when the voices against transient residents began to raise. First, one municipality banned all short-term rentals. Others followed suit with less restrictions but more monetary gain by applying licensing. And I'm not saying that that's something we should be fighting against. There's nothing wrong with reasonable restrictions and reasonable licensing fees. I think that makes it all a more responsible operation.

Heather Bayer
But one after the other, public meetings were held with more strident anti-Airbnb voices being heard. And after the COVID real estate boom, there were even more draconian measures put in place. Some cottage rental companies, ours included, operated across multiple municipalities. And you can imagine how difficult it was keeping tabs on all the different regulatory criteria for each one. It became almost a full-time job. Eventually, we created an Association of Ontario Property Managers, and that's grown to represent dozens of companies now with activities across the Province. We'd been helped by Rent Responsibly in the early days of our association, with really good advice and resources, and I know that today's guest has had a good relationship with them since she founded the Vermont Short-Term Rental Association in 2021.

Heather Bayer
So Julie Marks is a homesteader. She has two of her own rental properties and a small portfolio of managed homes in Vermont. She served on the Government Affairs Committee for VRMA and is passionate about bringing people together to tackle regulatory and compliance issues, as well as raising standards across the board in our industry. With the conference in Vermont, just over six weeks away, I wanted to talk to her about the power of bringing like-minded people together and how being small and local can create a really powerful force.

Heather Bayer
So I'm super excited to have with me today Julie Marks from the Vermont Short-Term Rental Association. And I'm particularly happy to talk to Julie today because in a matter of five or six weeks, I think, I'll be heading to Vermont for the Association Conference. And I'm really looking forward to it, getting together with people I've known for so long, like Tyann Marcink and Justin Ford and Sibylle Kim, and meeting Julie, who I'm talking to today in person; that will be fantastic. So yes, all together. Welcome, Julie. It's great to have you on board to talk about the conference to talk about networking and regulations and all that fun stuff.

Julie Marks
Thank you, Heather. It's so nice to be on the show with you, and I'm thrilled as well that you'll be in Vermont in a matter of weeks and sharing all of your wisdom and knowledge with us. So yeah, really looking forward to all of this.

Heather Bayer
Well, interestingly, I've been in Canada for 22 years now, and I've never been to Vermont, and it's just over the border.

Julie Marks
I know. It's South Canada, essentially. So we're excited to have you.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, I know. Mike and I went and spent a couple of days with Kerry Gibson at Chalet Hygge in the Eastern Townships, and we went out to dinner on the first night, and it was a beautiful lakeside restaurant. And she was saying, Across the water, there's Vermont.

Julie Marks
Love it. Well, be happy to host you during our new famous season of The Sticks. So you'll get a unique view.

Heather Bayer
Sorry, I hadn't heard of that before. Season of the Sticks..... means?

Julie Marks
In Vermont, we pride ourselves on having seven seasons in the year. And one of them in November, when our conference is this year, is famously known as our Stick Season. It's typically when no tourists are in town, but all the leaves have fallen off the trees, but the snow hasn't fallen yet to cover everything in white. And so you can just see through the forest. And yeah, it has a beauty all of its own.

Heather Bayer
I love November. It is so quiet and still and as you say, bereft of tourists.

Julie Marks
Yes, it's a really peaceful time.

Heather Bayer
So we're going to talk today about the conference that's going on in November. We'll come back to that a little bit later on. But I wanted to really start out by asking you how you actually got involved in the vacation rental business. I want you to tell us a little bit more about homesteading, because that was so interesting when I saw it in your bio, so you're going to need to explain that in your intro.

Julie Marks
Yeah, absolutely. I am somebody who definitely didn't start out with any intention to join the vacation rental industry. But as my life evolved and I found myself living in a big city and very much missing my rural upbringing, like the surroundings of my rural upbringing in Vermont, I became very interested in this concept of homesteading, living off the land, being self-sufficient, growing my own food, and just reducing my impact on the world. My partner and I did a bunch of studying, a bunch of homesteading. I became a certified master gardener We found a property in the foothills of Vermont where we could build a garden, a big vegetable garden and fruit garden and all this. But we were taking a page out of, literally, a book called The Good Life, which was written by a couple of original Vermont homesteaders from the 1930s. One of the lessons that they taught is that as a homesteader, you still need a cash crop. Their cash crop was maple syrup. They had a bunch of sugar maples on their property, and they were able to harvest and sell for cash maple syrup, because, of course, we all know we can't fully live in a cashless economy.

Julie Marks
We don't have any sugar maples on our property and after hemming and hawing for some time as to what our cash crop might be, we landed on a vacation rental. So we built a little cabin, a little mother-in-law, on the corner of our property. We also created a designated guest suite within our own home and we began inviting the traveling public to come on vacation and experience our homestead, and it's really taken off from there.

Heather Bayer
That's fantastic. I love hearing origin stories, and that is such a great one, because you started this out because it was a means, it was definitely a means to an end to create the cash that you needed to complement what you were doing on the homestead. Sounds fantastic. But you do more than that now, don't you?

Julie Marks
Yes. So while our start into vacation renting was certainly a solution to building our homesteader's lifestyle that we were interested in creating for ourselves, we have since found ourselves taking on more and more. Really, this is through my family's influence. I come from a father who was a small-scale landlord when I was growing up, and my mother, who in her retirement, became an innkeeper. I have, over time, I've essentially acquired the home that was once the bed and breakfast that my mother ran and has been in our family since the early 1990s. My father has become interested in the short-term rental landscape as well. And so at this point now, I'm managing nine different units, a mixture of long-term rentals, medium, seasonal rentals and the traditional short-term vacation rental. So it's quite the job.

Heather Bayer
Yes. And when did you start? When did you start with your first property?

Julie Marks
The first property was the one on our homestead in 2018.

Heather Bayer
Okay, so not that long ago then?

Julie Marks
No, not that long ago at all.

Heather Bayer
So moving on from that, what inspired you to start up the Vermont Short-Term Rental Association? Is it an association or an alliance?

Julie Marks
Well, it's an association. The alliance is just in the title. In retrospect, I should have named it the Short-Term Rental Association.

Heather Bayer
That's a lesson learned. I've been naming it for you.

Julie Marks
Yeah, most people do. I'm not sure what the difference is, but VTSTRA was really inspired out of self-preservation from regulatory threats. My partner and I had moved back to Vermont with this dream of being able to create this new lifestyle for ourselves, one that gave us that flexibility and freedom to work the land the way that we wanted to and take care of properties and maintain landscapes that was important to us. But after two years of pouring literally all of our blood, sweat, and tears into building this business and this lifestyle, we were faced with regulations, first from the town, from the municipality, and then from the state. I just felt so utterly wronged and unseen and misunderstood that I just couldn't stay quiet and I couldn't do nothing. I had to do something, and I wasn't alone either at that point. Through the process of learning about the regulations that our town was proposing and attending those meetings, we began to emerge naturally as a community. I think communities do form naturally when you have a common denominator. And once we found that core, all I really did was step up and say, Okay, I'll take this on as a leader and build a website.

Heather Bayer
How did you start connecting those? With other short-term hosts. Because I know when we did this in Ontario, it was just property managers. So it was more of a property manager's association. And I think there were a few of us who said, No, come on, we should open this out to independent hosts as well. But there were a couple of very vocal managers who said, No, we don't want any independent hosts on here. They don't uphold the same standards as we do. And we could be just letting anybody in, which I think, personally, was a really short-sighted view. And what then happened, as more and more regulations came along, is that smaller networks started popping up all over the place. And there's probably about 20 or 30 of these smaller little associations of independent hosts, and this one larger managers' association. And I look at it now and I think, well, this is crazy. All these people have the same goals. They're addressing the same situations, and they're all having multiple meetings where one would do. And when I looked at yours, it is a combined effort.

Julie Marks
Yes, absolutely. I think it just is that way because of, obviously, my perspective, where I come from as an individual host and not a property manager of other people's homes. But also that's just a product of the landscape here in Vermont. The majority of our vacation rentals are independently owned and managed. I think only about 20% of our vacation homes are managed by a professional local companies. The management companies, they had not formed an association for themselves at that time. I certainly looked for that originally when I was floundering in this state of who's representing us? Who's on our side here when you're talking to the state legislature? Because it really shocked me that nobody was, that this was such a solid industry with such a deep-rooted history in Vermont going back decades, far beyond the advent of Airbnb. I just couldn't believe that this industry wasn't being represented in some way. Our membership, our community with the Alliance, is really just a reflection of what the vacation rental community looks like here in Vermont.

Heather Bayer
So still 80% independent hosts and around 20% managers?

Julie Marks
Yeah.

Heather Bayer
That's interesting. And just kudos to you for bringing these people together, because I know from other things that I've tried in the past, it can be just like herding cats to bring everybody not just into the same room, but onto the same... Talking from the same page, basically. So how do you do that? Because you've got to bring people together. And then regulations are not the easiest thing to discuss, particularly if you've got different municipalities with different thoughts on regulations. What challenges did you face when just trying to get everyone on the same page?

Julie Marks
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that was certainly part of our early day struggles and development as an association. But ultimately, what we had to do was establish some standards, which have eventually become a part of our criteria for membership. And so early on, we knew that one of the big problems or challenges we were facing in the conversations we were having with the community, with regulators, was what to do about those people who are bad actors, who are operating to a lower standard that the majority of us wouldn't approve of anyways and wouldn't behave in that manner to begin with. So we really set out to create a set of standards that would distinguish the good from the bad apples, so to speak.

Julie Marks
We really rally around the standards that we believe are achievable, are reasonable, and are the basic safety and community and good business practices that everybody who is partaking in the short-term rental activity should be following at a baseline. We really rally around that. Yeah, of course, in the beginning, I had people calling us up, furious that the fire marshal was in their cabin telling them to install fire alarms. At some point, you have to draw that line. We've said, Yeah, if you're renting out your cabin, you need to have fire alarms.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, that seems pretty much a no-brainer. I've just interviewed Justin Ford about safety, and he was talking about some of the real tragedies that have happened in the past year or so. We started off talking about a fire that was in Long Island, I think, two years ago, that killed two teenage girls. It was the owner's fault. They were charged just two weeks ago with 29 misdemeanors. They're all relating to smoke alarms and carbon monoxide alarms and doing DIY creations, which included a barbecue, which ultimately caused the fire. And they're waiting for their sentencing now. But one of the, and I can't remember what the charges were, but I'll put a link to that on the Show Notes and people can go listen to that episode with Justin and hear more about that, because you can't look at these things anymore and say, Well, that's never going to happen to me.

Julie Marks
Right. No, absolutely. You cannot compromise on safety. You do not grandfather in old safety codes that do not apply anymore. Because safety is paramount and it's number one, and that should be the priority for every operator, whether you are hosting somebody in your own home, or you are managing a suite of properties. It's just hands down number one, non-negotiable, safety first.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. Great that you have that in your standards, too. What benefits have the membership of VTSTRA had for your members?

Julie Marks
Well, I think we have really been able to do a lot for this community and even beyond the members that we have within our association, but for the larger industry, because we are able to bring those types of conversations and education to them for the first time. We are also bringing better enforcement and relations between state officials and short-term rental operators in ways that weren't able to be facilitated in the past. We've worked really hard to partner with the state agencies in housing and safety and health and natural resources to ensure that we are an aid in compliance when it comes to really important basic health and safety standards that already exist and that people just might not be aware of, because there's no magic trigger that happens when suddenly you decide to rent out a bedroom in your room. Nobody's alerted that you're doing this and becoming a landlord or a housing provider. Yes, once you do that, you fall under different legal obligations, but there's not a really good system in place that catches people at the very beginning or even before they venture into that realm to really understand what their legal requirements are.

Julie Marks
We have ended up being a very important resource for especially new operators who are searching for resources when they're getting started and finding us, which is excellent and a perfect time to opt in and take advantage of all the resources that we offer. But we also have become an incredibly valuable resource to the state, who reach out to us when they need to send messages to vacation rental owners about new fire safety requirements, bear interactions with visitors, when they need assistance in housing after some of the huge flood disasters that we've had in Vermont the past couple of years. There's a lot of ways in which creating this association has brought visibility to this community in a way that didn't exist ever before and has generated some really, really positive relationships and a much better understanding of how the vacation rental community is really intertwined or a part of the fabric of Vermont's local economies.

Heather Bayer
Did you find, when you started engaging with local and state officials, that some of them had completely no idea what this business was about?

Julie Marks
Oh, absolutely. And to this day, I mean, that's the job security I guess in this association world, is every cycle, there are new people coming into office, whether it's in a municipality or it's at the state. We have to start over every time with education and awareness and understanding. I think my favorite line from one of our legislators was, It's not that I have a problem with short-term rentals, it's the Airbnbs I don't like. And that's the point where you have to take a step back and say, Okay, that's where we are starting from with you.

Heather Bayer
And that's where I was coming from with that question about these people who have no idea, because I spent time working with Catherine Ratcliff over the last nine months or so, leading up to the CanStays Rental Alliance Conference in Banff. And she brought in politicians and people from the legislature and local people and even federal politicians. It does help that Catherine's brother was the conservative leader for some time and only narrowly missed becoming Prime Minister. So he was able to come along and talk, as was another minister from another party. So it was interesting. But with all these people in the room, they were needing to be educated because all they could say is it's AirBnB.

Heather Bayer
I come from buying properties in the 1990s and renting them out way before AirBnB, way before the... It wasn't way before VRBO, because that was out there then, but before what Vrbo is now. And I still do a lot of educating these days to say rentals didn't start in 2014 when Airbnb really hit our vacation rental scene. They've been going for a long, long time. And yes, trying to create that distinction, but also telling people the concept is one and the same, but there are different ways that people manage them. So that was what prompted that question because I was sure you'd have gone through exactly the same thing when... Well, it's an Airbnb, isn't it?

Julie Marks
Right. We do a lot of work to try to change the narrative and the vocabulary, especially starting within our membership, but then just more broadly within our regulating community, within our general community, because it is the source of a lot of false perceptions and misunderstanding. So language is very important, words matter. We have worked really hard to try to educate people on the definitions and what is the difference between the legal definition and an industry term.

Julie Marks
We found that really when you were speaking to government officials, whether they're at the state level or the local level, there's no real cookie cutter way to educate somebody. It all has to be customized. It all has to be personalized because everybody does start from their own place and have their own preconceptions formed already that you have to dig into and discover in order to break down and really help them understand what it is that they might be afraid of. Because it usually turns out to be something completely different than just the fact that somebody is renting their house short-term.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, we faced a lot of these issues. I remember driving down the road once, I was going to see a property that the owner had just bought and wanted to bring it onto our rental program. And as I drove down this road, I was faced with this barrage of signs all the way down the road. No Airbnb, Get Airbnb Out of Here. And I realized by the time I got to this house, as it was, I could not rent that property for them, because there were clearly going to be a few neighbor issues.

Julie Marks
Yeah, absolutely. And that's a key challenge anywhere, which is why it's so important to have a local community association of hosts and managers, because they're the ones who are responsible for those neighbor relations. If you are an owner and you're not on site, you absolutely have to employ some other additional strategies for ensuring that you are not creating a nuisance to your neighbors. Because that is 100% where these regulations start every single time. It's from one complaint, one person who continues to show up and complain to their town officials until they finally do something about it. It might be a one-off thing that really doesn't warrant a widespread policy, but that doesn't seem to be a factor that matters to municipal lawmakers. They listen to the squeaky wheel, and it's our responsibility to keep them greased.

Heather Bayer
Yes. While I was in Banff, I met a guy who... Gosh, Ben. His name was Ben, and I can't remember his last name. I'm sorry, but I'll put a link to the... Ben Pereira, I have remembered. I met this guy called Ben Pereira, who runs a company called Neighbourly North in the Yukon, in Whitehorse, and he was talking about being a voice at the table. His voice at the table became his seat on the housing committee.

Julie Marks
Absolutely. Well, that's what they say. If you're not at the table, then you're on the menu, so bring your own chair if you have to. And that's really how we got our start into the door. We just showed up unexpectedly. I remember, I'll never forget the looks on the faces the first time we did this. We registered to participate in our state tourism conference to introduce ourselves to other tourism players. The first item on that agenda was an open board meeting from the Lodging Association. At that time, this was before the pandemic, which really changed the ties in terms of who was coming after short-term rentals. It started in 2019 as the hotel industry was really lobbying against vacation rentals as unfair competition and uneven playing fields, etc. They weren't super friendly to us, but I showed up to their board meeting and just sat and listened. I've never seen a group of adults more uncomfortable and nervous than in that moment. I didn't really understand at that time the impact that I was having, or that I wasn't expected to have actually shown up and attended this open meeting. But we did, and it's led to every other connection that we've been able to make and every other door that we've been able to open. So just showing up and inserting yourself. I'm here!

Heather Bayer
That's what I hear from so many people who've done this. For those people who are out there listening who are thinking that they don't have a group or an alliance in their local area, what advice would you give them? What should they do? What should they not do?

Julie Marks
I firmly believe that every single state, every single province, every single country needs to start organizing, if there's a vacation rental community in  your area. Because it's not a matter of if regulations come to your neck of the woods, it's just a matter of when.

Julie Marks
In the United States, at least, if you are looking to start an alliance or an association for the vacation rental community, number one, find out if anybody else is doing it already first. I highly recommend the Rent Responsibly website, rentresponsibly.org, to search for alliances. They have a great map directory where you can find all of the registered vacation rental associations. See if there's something already started in your area. If so, join them. If not, start one.

Julie Marks
Rent Responsibly now has an amazing suite of resources and services even to help people get up and running with an association. There is no starting from scratch anymore. We have really done a lot of that legwork already, and there's been so much experience developed over the past 5-10 years now in the realm of vacation rental associations, that you are certainly not alone and you do not have to reinvent the wheel. There are a ton of great resources through them, and that is the whole purpose of their existence. Hopefully, you can put a link to that as well for our listeners to learn more about Rent Responsibly and their network of alliances.

Heather Bayer
And yes, after this call with you, I am going straight over to one with Alexa Nota....

Julie Marks
Perfect!

Heather Bayer
... from Rent Responsibly. So yes, we're going to be talking about regulations and the same thing within the coaching program that we're doing with property managers to encourage them to go out and connect with others.

Heather Bayer
In Ontario, when I started my company in 2002, and nobody talked to anybody at that time. And it wasn't until around 2015 that I was able to have a decent conversation with a 'competitor', really one of my local other property managers who I met at a VRMA conference. And we sat down and we had coffee and it's like, Oh, gosh, we're real people, and we all do exactly the same thing. Why aren't we talking? And he shared some things that I was able to put in place in my business that made a massive difference. It was what I used to call "The one conversation that changed our business." And it was a conversation with another manager who was willing to share. And what he shared and what I put in place in my business made absolutely no difference to how competitive our businesses were. It just simply made ours better.

Heather Bayer
And it was a piece of sharing that made me really think, why aren't we doing this? Why aren't we getting out and bringing everybody in together and talking about our shared experiences and how we can work together to make our little world better for everybody, for our guests and for our owners and for our communities?

Julie Marks
It's so true. It's so true. I mean, one of the things that I love the most about being a part of this community and leading this community is being able to remove that layer of competition or that lens of looking at another business owner as a competitor and rather looking at them as an ally and a source of information and support. It's just been so organic, really, I think, especially when you start from a place of shared pain, meaning the regulations, you're on the same team. It really helps to change that lens and see your neighboring business as more of a partner than a competitor. I think at the community level, we all benefit when we're all stronger. So I agree.

Julie Marks
I'm always happy to see that and love to foster any way that we can as an association to help nurture those business-to-business collaborations and remove that sense of competition. I think in Stowe here, our community had to come together recently around some proposed regulations, and it was because of that we were able to get all of the big property managers, along with individual homeowners, in a room together. Some of these big companies that had been around for decades had never met each other before. And now they're essentially like friends. It's just wonderful, too, when you can build a community and bring people together to rally around a common cause, to learn something new and to develop relationships that just go far beyond the work that we're doing today.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, I love it. And I certainly did love it when we got together as a network or as an organization up in Ontario. And we had two or three face-to-face meetings where everybody tore themselves out of their little locations and their burrows and headed off somewhere. And we actually met face-to-face, which I think is just an absolute must do, which brings me to really the conference. But before that, how do you keep... You have the annual conference, but how else do you keep people connected and engaged within the Alliance?

Julie Marks
Yeah, well, we offer a number of ways for people to engage. Everybody's different. People like to participate at different levels or in different ways. So we host virtual meetings monthly, every month. It's open to all of our members. We call it our State of STR Affairs meeting. That's an opportunity for all of our members to come together, have a chat with myself and our hired lobbyist to get updates on regulations and also share what's going on in their communities in terms of advocacy regulation. A really good one-on-one time for us to support people in their personal situations and advise them on strategies or point them to resources to help them wherever they're at in their advocacy efforts locally. So that's great. And then member-to-member in that meeting, the sharing of experience and knowledge of what worked in this town. You could try this here. This didn't work for us. Watch out for this law or this rule. We got our hands slapped for doing this. I mean, it's invaluable. And that's a really easy way for people to join virtually from wherever they are. We also try to hold in-person gatherings as much as possible, just because, like you said, nothing beats that face-to-face connection.

Julie Marks
So we do quarterly meetups that are free and open to the public. We call them Sip and STRS, a sip and S-T-Rs. We try to engage the local business community by hosting them at breweries, distilleries, and cideries, and coffee shops. So get the business community connected to us and have a space where we can just gather casually and just get to know each other and maybe invite a friend that doesn't know about the association to come learn about us more. And then, of course, we have our annual conference, which is really our big multi-day event for education, networking, member bonding, so to speak.

Heather Bayer
Is this just open for members or can people come from elsewhere?

Julie Marks
It's absolutely open to anybody. We do encourage our members to attend. Our members are given a 40% discount on the conference registration. Again, this is part of our goal of ensuring that our membership are the best stewards of the industry that they can be. We want them to get this continual education around safety and regulations and hospitality, so that we are never the ones who are causing or triggering the complaints. But it is open to anybody. We highly encourage anybody who's in property management, anybody who's a homeowner, considering entering the industry. That's always really the best time to get to do your education and professional development investment is at the beginning. We always invite all of our local elected officials and candidates to attend, because they are the ones who truly benefit the most from face time with this community.

Heather Bayer
So what's happening then at the event this year? If somebody's listening and they're thinking, Well, I'm not far away. I'm in Pennsylvania or New York State or even in Ontario. What could I expect by going?

Julie Marks
Well, we are so excited to be bringing some of the biggest names and superstars together at this event, including our wonderful host, Heather Bayer, there to learn all about what not to do in your vacation rental business. But we have a heavy focus this year on standing out and out competing. So if you are really concerned right now in this point in time, that you are either entering a marketplace that's a little bit saturated or you're maybe seeing a drop in your bookings or occupancy, and you are trying to find ways to optimize your earnings and your ROI, that is what we are going to be focusing on.

Julie Marks
There are a lot of different ways in which you can optimize your business, whether it's through new amenities, new marketing, different approaches to reservations. We're going to have all of those experts in one room talking to us about all the different ways that you can, whether you own a large company, small company, or an individual owner, there are always ways that you can improve the efficiency of your business, attracting what people are looking for now. We've got a lot of great vendors in the room with the tools and services that we think will be most effective and useful for helping people achieve those goals.

Heather Bayer
I note that you have Justin Ford coming. No doubt he's going to be talking about safety.

Julie Marks
Yes, Justin Ford is a fan favorite. Last year, we also had him give a presentation on safety, and he actually sent one attendee running out the room to go do something at her rental. That scared her so much, that was obviously needing addressing. I always love to have Justin Ford again. Safety is where we win every time with advocacy, and yes, absolutely love getting as many people in front of him and hearing his message as much as I can.

Heather Bayer
I can't not mention my friend Tyann Marcink as well.

Julie Marks
Tyann, another superstar. I know. It's an awesome lineup. Tyann is fabulous, and as the Queen of Guest Experience and all things guest communication. I never know what I'm going to learn from her, but I know that I'm going to learn something, and she's going to surprise us. I'm really grateful to have her in the room as well. I've been fortunate to spend some time with her recently as she has ventured into the world of advocacy more and more herself, unfortunately for her. But she is just such a strong leader, and her wealth of knowledge just continues to expand.

Heather Bayer
Well, I'm going to make sure that all the information on the VTSTRA Conference is on the Show Notes, so regardless of whether you live in Vermont or not. It's a smaller conference. It's the type of conference I absolutely love, because you have much better conversations, you have much lengthier conversations, and much deeper conversations, I think, than trying to get through the crush of the VRMA crowd. When there's 2500-3,000 people there, having a smaller group of people, it's so much more focused and concentrated; I love it. So if you get the opportunity, go take a look at the website. And I hope to see lots of people there. I'm going to see lots of people I've never met before, which will be absolutely lovely, and I will meet you face-to-face.

Julie Marks
I'm so looking forward to that. And you're so right. I think we get so much from those more intimate settings where you can have more conversations. Our attendees will be able to talk to you directly, which is not always the at bigger conferences. You don't get to speak to every speaker or every vendor in a way that actually has an impact on the way you run your business. But that is exactly what we intend to accomplish at this event. It's just always so much fun. We all feel good when we learn something new and make new business connections, and are in a room with our people.

Julie Marks
This is a really passionate community, and we're passionate about the integrity of our homes and the excellence of our hospitality and the stewardship of our location and our culture. But I think this community, there's a lot within that is accessible to people from all backgrounds and all beliefs. In this room, we all find something in common. We all have something in common, and it's so it's lovely to be around. It's something we don't get enough of these days.

Heather Bayer
Well, I shall look forward very much to being there, to meeting you. And I just want to thank you so much for spending the time with me today and exploring this world of regulations and networking and getting out there and getting a seat at the table. So thank you so much, Julie, for joining me.

Julie Marks
Thank you, Heather, for inviting me and allowing me to share about VTSTRA and about the importance of building communities locally.

Heather Bayer
Thank you so much, Julie Marks, from the Vermont Short-Term Rental Alliance. And I look forward to meeting Julie in person in just six weeks or so's time, which is absolutely wonderful. Can't wait for that. I love these smaller conferences. I always come away way more inspired and motivated  than some of the larger ones. So, yeah, looking forward to that.

Heather Bayer
If anybody is going or thinking about going, would like to have more information on what's going on, and you'd like to talk to me or talk to Julie, just get in touch - heather@vacationrentalformula.com - and I will give you as much information and help as I can.

Heather Bayer
Okay, that's it for this week. It's been an absolute pleasure, always a pleasure, to bring this really great information and conversation to you. I do hope you enjoy it. Love to hear from you if you've got any ideas for future episodes. We're up to about 580 now, and I'm still coming up with ideas and new people and different ways of presenting things. But I'm always open to new ideas. And if you email me, I'll email you back and we'll have a conversation and you bring me something new. That would be fantastic. So for now, thank you. Enjoy the rest of your day and I'll be with you again next week.

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.