Property management firm MadeComfy has built a platform that allows traditional real estate agents to get into the short-term rental market. More importantly, it is now scaling that service to a level typically not found in Australia, requiring it to add new SaaS infrastructure capabilities to its proprietary solution.

Through the implementation of a Salesforce Service Cloud Made Comfy believes it can now scale properties under management from 1000 to 2000 without having to add customer support staff, and while still delivering above industry average returns for clients.

It has its eye on an overseas expansion, starting in New Zealand, and is in the midst of a Series C capital where it is seeking to raise $20 million. Its series B round raised 10 million.

According to CTO Ben Willis, “We are very focused on the property performance in terms of return on revenue. And that’s how we benchmark because everything else flows into it. If you get good guest reviews then you get better profit.” 

MadeComfy’s goal is to deliver returns 15 per cent above the market. It was achieving that before Covid, and the returns actually spiked during the pandemic. The good news though is that while it's not getting the 30 to 40 per cent above market results during the pandemic, the long-term trend sees returns sitting well above that important 15 per cent benchmark. 

"And now we are getting 20 per cent consistently across the board," he says.

There's a simple and immutable rule driving that improvement - better customer experiences.

“The only way for us to achieve that is to get the best reviews."

The company specialises in managing short-term rentals for services like Airbnb and Bookings.com. “Our focus is on real estate agents. Real estate agents don't actually have short-term rentals in their portfolio they have sales and long-term rentals, and really want to get in the market. We provide them with the service.”

MadeComfy handles a range of services for the agents, such as managing the advertising right through to key management which Willis describes as “a massive part of short-term rentals.”

“We do all the guest service, everything to do with guest communications, check-in, guest support. Real estate agents really struggle is guests. They don’t have the scale to manage guests.”

The business currently manages between 1000 and 1100 properties, making it one of the biggest providers of short-term rentals in Australia.

“Most companies cap out at about a hundred. So we're one of the bigger players in Australia for property management for that. And we built a lot of proprietary software to handle all these guest services, and all of this marketing all in one place.”

However, he says, “When you've got 1000 plus properties, across multiple platforms, trying to handle guests and all their communications requests is nearly impossible to scale. It's a reason why most of those property managers cap out at about 100 properties.”

Once you hit that limit, then you have to start adding call centres at scale to handle that, he says.

“If you message on Airbnb as far as your guests are concerned, you're in the channel and you’re talking to Airbnb.

“Our reports managing guest experiences are using Salesforce Service Cloud. They get a case, it doesn't matter where it comes from. We've got a custom piece of chat and the reps can chat back and forth to the guest, and they can multiple chats open.”

According to Willis, “In the past, for every 50 properties we have to add two or three staff. That's where we were at and that was never going to work.

Whereas now when we add properties, we really don't have to add any more staff. We’ve got a support team of about 20 to service the 1000. And we probably won't have to grow at all through to 2000 properties.”