Episode 042 – Our Interview with William Evans and Elise Renard from Party Squasher

 

This week we highlight Michelle’s interview with William Evans and Elise Renard from Party Squasher.  This company not only has a great name but a great product.  Learn more about it and why having products like Party Squasher can save you money.

Plus, contest details are inside this episode!  Enter to win BIG!!  Go and Grow!

 

 

Transcript of this Episode:

Hi, this is Michelle, the master of money mindset, and you are listening to BNB dash boss podcast.

And in today's podcast, we are going to be talking to party. Squasher William Evans and Elise Renard are here from party squasher. And they're going to tell us all about their product, all about their company and give us a lot of information that we need, because we know that right now. Parties are the number one adversary of our short-term rental business.

And that's because when parties occur, it bothers the neighbors, the noise level bothers everyone. The police are called. You have property damage. I mean, it's our biggest challenge right now. And if there is any kind of restrictions going on in the areas, it's usually because of parties, because it bothers the neighbors, not just the noise level and everything, but the parking.

The garbage, the trash, it's a Berry big, big problem for us. So I wanted you to know all about party. Squasher using products like party squasher. I mean, this is really great because if you have flusher in your rental right now, you probably know that you could call up your insurance company and say, Hey, look, I have these preventative measures set up inside my units.

And you can get discounts on your insurance. There are also cities like Scottsdale going up and they want everyone to use some kind of product like party squasher nor noise aware, anything like that. So, These products are really going to help us in our industry. And it's imperative that we know about them and take a look at some really great companies.

Who've done some really great things in effort to prevent parties from occurring in our rental properties. So without further ado, William Evans and Elise Renard with party squasher hi bill. I'm so happy that you are here to join us today and tell us all about party. Squasher all about your company and your product.

Tell us how you got started. Tell us a little bit about your company and then let's hear about your product. We're grateful for the opportunity to tell people about our product. We have a lot of video demos describing our product on our website. 40 squasher is a, is a product family of a company called blue zoo.

Blue's zoo sells products primarily to industrial customers. Uh, we have, uh, a big engineering team. Uh, we have a lot of patents and we have a technology that you really could not justify developing only for the short-term rental market. Uh, So, so to, to justify the investment, um, you need a bigger market.

And our company got started with the focus on two different markets. They were out of home. Uh, advertising and hospitality. So some of the biggest out-of-home advertisers in the world, like JC Dayco, use our product to measure the audience that can see their out of home advertising. So if, if you go around the world and you see a bus stop, lo and behold, the bus stop has two flat panels.

Usually at 90 degrees, each flat panel has an advertisement on each side for a total of four panels. Okay. When they sell these panels to advertisers, like, uh, like whomever, like a, a luxury good. Chris Jones, your for example, um, they need to tell that advertiser, the size of the audience, how many people are seeing that advertisement, because that's the basis of the pricing.

So our product can measure the number of people in the vicinity of that, uh, of that advertisement. Okay, that's pretty cool. How did you get into party squad? We got into party squasher because one of our employees was an Airbnb host and she said this technology would be great for, for, uh, Airbnb hosts because we have a serious problem with parties and we need to know when we rented out.

A detached home to two or three people and 25 people show up because that's a bad sign. And so we had a small engineering team on the, on the side, develop this product and despite our best efforts to not promote it, it's been very well received. And, uh, well, it's got a great name too. Whoever named it, like that's an awesome name.

Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a cool name. Not everybody can spell washer. Washer. Thank goodness for Google. So if you, if you put it in there, eventually you'll come up with you and get it. Well, parties are an especially last year because because of the lockdown bars were closed. And so we saw a huge rise in our properties, having parties and my properties.

Um, the, the two main states that I focus in are Arizona and Florida. And. Arizona has a lot, all of our short-term rentals, it's illegal to have parties. And anywhere in the state of Arizona, you can't have a party inside of a short-term rental. And when they made it illegal, it was like, well, have a heck, are we going to stop this?

Because, you know, especially if you're, if you're a host, um, and your properties are more than 50 miles away from you, how are you going to even know. Besides your neighbor or something else. So this, this product actually came on the market at a very, very good time. Well, it's been, it's been on the market for several years.

We, we have, uh, hundreds of, of customers and thousands of devices out in the, in the eater. Um, it's, it's ramped up though, as you suggest, it's really ramped up in, in, in recent years. Also a lot of municipalities have, have taken steps to try to prevent parties because the backlash from locals has been substantial.

The best technology before our product were. Was based on noise, you would have sensors that would measure levels of noise. Uh, but those sensors, they depend on wifi. So they're hard to install. Uh, those sensors have to be put in each room. If you're really going to hear the noise, they get confused because of.

Margarita blenders and, and crying babies. Uh, so we've gotten huge uplift people. We measure the, the number of people at a place on the basis of signals admitted spontaneously by mobile phones. So they don't have to sign in. It's the pings that you get. Right. They get it's it's the, the engineers call them probes.

The, the mobile phone send off probes because they're looking for access points. The phones want to know. Is there an access point out there? So the phone says I am here. Is there an access point? And then the access points will respond if there are access points, but we passively listen for those probes and we're able to keep track of how many people are in the vicinity.

And you can, you can dial in the vicinity that you care about, uh, using a mobile app that we provide. So, uh, it's it's, our solution is easy to deploy. It will tell you about a party long before the noise starts. We're in a trial, uh, down in, I dunno if it's public Elise, but we're in a trial down in, um, in the Coachella valley.

Um, public. Yeah. Public. Yeah. Yes, they did an announcement. So we are, uh, right now working with the city of LA Quinta. Uh, because they decided the municipality decided to fight back and, um, against parties. And they've been pretty happy, uh, from what our customer success team has been. Um, the response. Yeah, just having those a lot of times saves us as hosts.

If we, if we can say that we have a party squasher device or, you know, any kind of device that, that. Monitors the noise or the number of people that then the HOA is, and the people who are, you know, the governing bodies that we are answering to, they seem to back off a little bit. And actually there've been some places where the, um, Fines and fees have been reduced because we as hosts have done everything that we possibly can to reduce the, you know, the fact that somebody is throwing a party.

I think the plan of Lakita is that they're going to require that everybody has some kind of. Party prevention tool. And again, back in the day, the only option was noise monitoring, but, but since then our product has come on the market. And, uh, we think that it's a much better solution than noise monitoring.

One example at Lakita was in the test set of 25 short-term rental properties. One of them had a party and we. Sent out an alert, alerting people, the hosts to the party at about 5:00 PM. And the noise monitors didn't catch on until nine or 10:00 PM. Oh wow. Cause the noise, the noise came late after the alcohol had been consumed, but we knew the people were there well in advance.

So, and truthfully party's question helps you to prevent more than the noise. It helps you prevent. Problems with your neighbors, uh, when it comes to parking, because like street parking can become a problem and it's just makes you a better neighbor and a better person in the community. Very true. Very true.

So how does the noise, okay, so parties squash, or you plug it in to your internet router, and then w then what happens? Like does it, um, Like, how do we make sure that nobody's messing with it? Because that's another thing now we've got a lot of, uh, techie kids, you know, we've got millennials coming in and these kids aren't brainless.

If they see a camera, they cover it. If they see something on the internet, they want to unplug it. How can we prevent that? Well, you put it in a locked closet. I mean that's router stuff. Will it still work when it's in a closet? The miracle of Wi-Fi it goes right through doors and walls. So yeah, it works fine.

You put it in a lot closet and, and, uh, and it will continue to passively listen for the presence of cell phones. And the device is very small and very sleek. It's just a little black box and there is no marketing on it, nothing. So kids like, except that they really know that there is a party's questioning in the house and they actively look for it.

Like otherwise there is no wifi. Yeah. Yeah. Most of the time they're looking for cameras. Um, and they're also looking for kind of a, you know, a smoke device because we have like, non-smoking a lot of us have non-smoking so yeah. Um, if something was attached to the internet, they would probably think it had something to do with the door locks or something.

Yeah. And if, if kids are suspicious about cameras, I, you know, I would be as well. I would not want to rent, you know, a hotel room or a short-term rental that had cameras inside. None of us have. Yeah. None of us would put a camera inside, but outside no, some people do you can't. The rules are, the rules are very precise.

They say you can't put them in, in certain kind of rooms. You can't put them in bedrooms, but you can put them in some other rooms. I forget which of the, I think in shared properties, I've heard people that do, um, where they only rent out a room at a time that they'll put them in common rooms, like a living room or something.

But, you know, I always tell people, I mean, you want them at the entrances and exits of your property, but you know, you don't want to intrude on your privacy of your own. Yes. I agree. Insight is creepy, but I think my microphones are creepy too. I, I don't know. I don't want a microphone. I'd almost rather have a camera than a microphone.

Oh, well, crazy part is a lot of us have echoes. I'm not going to say her name, but do you know who I'm talking about? Um, and. Uh, Google voice things and those that, you know, you're like, if you want to talk about monitoring, those guys are all recording you too. I mean, they know it's funny, we'll talk about something.

We won't even have her on. And next thing we know, you know, you're searching on the internet for something, and there's an ad for something you just talked about. And you're like, wow, that's creepy. Like I haven't researched anything or anything, but here's an ad for it. But by comparison our, our device, we don't know the phone number of the mobile phone.

We don't know who owns it. We don't know what phone numbers it calls. All we know is that, is there. How do you know that it's not, um, let's say somebody comes in and they've got a laptop and they've got their iPad and they've got their cell phone. Um, and they come in with several devices. How do you, how can you tell that we don't know that you don't know, but, but there is a, uh, w w we're not promising to tell you how many people are in your house.

We're promising to alert you to. A party information. So we've had people come to us and say, can we license your service? So that I'll know if my daughter has a boyfriend over. Well, we don't, we don't have that kind of accuracy. You know, if the mailman comes to the door and hangs out for a few minutes, we'll count the mailman.

So that's not the kind of accuracy we we provide, but if you're expecting five people and you get 25, we will know that unequivocally. And, and that's, and that's why people choose our product because we alert them to, to, uh, to crowds of people. We permit you to set a threshold effectively you and installed the device simply by plugging it into your, um, your router.

And then you take a cell phone and with the cell phone camera, you scan a QR code on the bottom of our device. And that links it up to your account in the cloud. And then you put in the limit at which you want to be alerted. So you get to set the baseline. That's nice. Right? So the, the host decides I want to get alerted at 10 people or 20 people, whatever.

So you type that in you, you also have a chance to say whether your property is small, medium, or large, right. If it's a small house, you don't want to be, you know, counting the phones of your, your neighbors. Uh, this is a simplified version again, of our industrial product, which has a lot more knobs and levers to it.

But it's you, you install it small, medium, large, um, threshold of, of 20 people. This is my phone number. This is my email address. And then when it detects an overage, you get either a text message or an email and that's it. Truthfully, the installation is never more than 10 minutes and I did it without the knowledge of like all of it.

And. Seven minutes, total. And it was done in the sun. Wow. That's awesome. The, the only thing that it needs your internet for is to send out the alerts. So it's not, it, it sends out the, well, it sends out the alerts and it sends out the, the occupancy count to our cloud because all of this analysis. Is being done in our cloud.

So the data goes to the cloud and then from the cloud, we make it available on your cell phone. But we use very little bandwidth because we're periodically every minute or two, we're just saying, okay, now they're 13 people. Now they're 15 people. Now they're three people. So it doesn't, it doesn't require much bandwidth, but it requires connectivity.

And if that, that clever tenant decides to disconnect it, we will know. And we will send you a notice as well. Oh, so you can tell if it's been tampered. Well, yeah, we absolutely. If it's disconnected, we absolutely know. And. Aside from disconnecting it, you really can't tamper with it. Cause you could wrap it in a pillow, but that won't affect it will.

Yeah. And then also it's great to know, for example, if there was power out, uh, outages in your area, um, because we'll know through it too. So if you have any problem with your house and you see that as disconnected and you not supposed to have anybody in the house, uh, that could be very useful also for you.

Oh, yeah. So you can tell us when our internet is working and not working. So if it's gone out that and that it's all on the app, you can read that all on the app. Yeah. That's something that, what we do is we tell you when we've lost connectivity to our sensor, and that can either be because it's disconnected or because it's unplugged or because the whole house has lost power.

All of those things will be detected the same way. We've got the majority of our listeners are new to, to hosting. So they have between one and five properties. So how affordable is it for somebody who's just getting started? This, the whole summit that we're doing right now is sending people up with devices and, um, you're in our tech day and our tech day is, you know, devices that are going to help you run your property better, you know, just.

Make things your life easier and make things easier to duplicate. And so we thought, you know, obviously parties are a huge problem. It's our biggest problem. I think as short-term rental owners are parties. And so making sure that we are preventing parties and doing everything we can is a big part of it.

But how affordable is this for somebody getting started and, and does it get easier as we grow? Well, it gets easier as you grow because we offer discounts for volume purchases. We have individual operators with hundreds of properties. And when you, when you buy several hundred of our sensors, the cost per sensor and the cost for the service.

Go down. So to that extent that that the price goes down, but we think we think of our pricing as, as like,

What you would pay for insurance? The, the purpose of the devices to prevent, uh, degradation in your reputation to prevent damage, to prevent complaints, to prevent the arrival of the police. It's too, as Elise said earlier, it's to, to make sure that your customers aren't on your, your, um, Okay. Your neighbors are not unhappy because of parking problems and noise and so on.

So, so that's why, why people buy our product. What we haven't done that we probably should do is work with insurance companies to get insurance companies, to subsidize the service that will probably happen in the future because insurance companies care about predicting and preventing risks, not just pricing risks, right.

Uh, but today the price of the service for a consumer is I think $250 for the first year of lease. Yes, $250 for the first year followed by $200 a year subsequently, which is actually quite a low price when he come to it because we have multiple customers that pay 200, 300. Like, and then sometimes in the thousands, if there was a party that happened.

Oh, heck yeah. Because like it cost to repairs. It's like the cleaning, the repair, the damage, the fines, the fees and the, you know, all the, yeah. Everything that accumulates on top of that. Exactly. So it's 250, uh, we'll say for the first year and 200 afterwards, but it's probably going to save you. Thousands of dollars because even if you said the traditional at 20 people and 20 people are arriving at five, if you showed up at nine, the house is already dirty, like, and damage.

But if you arrive at Sapphire, what people are still, um, just joining in the party, you can kick everybody out and your house is still immaculate. Yep. Very true case studies about customers like this on our website. And we could line you up to talk with some of them if you'd like. So, so your, your target market is more, are, are individual property owners and operators.

We also have, as I suggested earlier, a separate larger market for corporate. Property owners that have properties and property managers, because a lot of us are co-hosting and we, we basically manage other, other BNB properties. Okay. If you, if you have more than a dozen properties, you might be interested in our party.

Squasher pro product, which includes a web dashboard. And that's really suitable if you have more than a, say a half dozen properties, but you can manage any number of properties as well. With the mobile app that we provide both for iPhone and Android. Do you have a friend and he's the one who was telling you about it?

He, um, Chris he's up in Napa valley and he had a party go on. Um, I don't know if you're a member, but last Halloween, the Halloween before last, when they had the shooting up there. Yeah. And his place was right down the way. And they had, uh, they had hired a bouncer, a door guy. They had put in a stripper pole.

Into his property. And then, and I mean, it was just, uh, uh, when he got everybody out, they had stolen appliances and everything. I mean, it was crazy and they have cameras, so they saw the party starting. And I, you know, they, they were able to nip stuff in the bud, but when they, when they moved the people out, they didn't see what was going down through the garage and through the garage, they were removing items from the house.

And so, you know, he got, he, he got stolen from and stuff. So a proper insurer is of great, um, insurance company and they give discounts for using specific products that makes it, like you said, um, like Elise was saying. Elise you said, okay, how much would they have paid for cleaning up the property? How much would they have paid for, you know, uh, fixing all the damages and how much would they have paid before, you know, the fines and the fees and all the legal, you know, Paperwork that comes with all of that.

Having the party, you save all that money. Well, it's, it's nice too, to have your insurance company say, and we'll give you 10% off because a lot of times, you know, 10%, that's a huge chunk of change. On our properties that will pay almost for the device in some cases. Good. That's a, that's a great, that's a great tip.

We really think that we are so qualitatively better than noise monitors, because noise monitors are so easy to confuse and muffle. Um, the fact that you need batteries to cover your outdoors, we don't need any of that. Yeah. And that's, I mean, honestly, it's always cool to have. Um, and that's usually the last question I ask everybody I'm interviewing.

I'm like, what are you guys working on in the future? What kind of options and features, but those are great options and features for people is when you work with, you know, work working with, I love it when all our devices work together, too, it's getting technology is so, I mean, it's amazing now. It can also be a little invasive.

So, so I you're, you're, you're demonstrating that I am of a, of a different generation perhaps than you are, because I, I worry about the, the, the privacy, but, you know, I would not, first of all, it would not be a nice thing if the guest could say. Uh, echo person and I won't say her name, echo person turn off that pesky party squasher device.

You know, we're, we're pretty innocuous. We're, we're sitting away maybe in a locked closet and we, we are, we are device for the benefit of the. I'm the host. We do a lot of business internationally and GDPR, the general data protection regulations that were started in Brussels. Um, maybe five years ago.

These are, these are a very big deal for our industrial customers. And that is coming to a short term rentals. People are going to be very sensitive or they're going to be sensitized by GDPR to what these devices can do. Oh, yeah, because they can gather all kinds of information and well, yeah, that microphone is just creepy in my book.

Yeah. Also a good thing. I was going to say a good thing about, um, to know about GDPR is it doesn't just apply in Europe. It also apply to any European citizen. So if you're renting to a European citizen, um, the device is also supposed to be also GDPR compliant. And to know Elise grew up in France. So she's very familiar with these, uh, these, uh, these, these PR regulations.

Nice. Well, w I, I don't know. We've got those in Hawaii now. I know we had a lot of challenges when we went to Hawaii this time, it felt very invasive in Hawaii because they gave us a. Uh, a barcode, we each had our barcode and we had to show it everywhere. We went and we were like, wow. Do your, do your property management companies would be, would they be the ones to install a party prevention device?

Or they would absolutely do that for me. They do all the maintenance on my buildings. Um, they take care of the everyday stuff. They take care of pool maintenance, landscaping. Um, changing up the filters every month. I mean, whatever has to be done, they're the ones. Right. But you would make the decision to have it installed.

Absolutely. Would the alerts come to you or would the alerts go to them? Go to them. Okay. Yep. They would go to them and the ones that I don't manage, um, on the properties that we manage, that we, we still, you know, own personally, uh, they would go to one of my VAs or one of my partners. Are your, are your places, do they tend to be detached homes or that's my favorite thing to do?

Yeah. Yeah, host big families. That's, that's the kind of thing you can't do in a hotel. I mean, that's the, that's the best part of the market. I have to say, because someday the hotels are going to fight back and the people who have condos are going to have more of a problem. But if you have a detached home, you're in a different market.

Absolutely. We didn't have challenges in Florida in those big properties with parties and things. It wasn't until we started buying all the smaller properties, um, that. That's where the trouble came in. We, we have, we have a lot of customers who have very large properties, luxurious properties that, that rent out for very substantial sums and they have party problems.

So I don't think party problems are limited to the low price. Yeah, no, not anymore. Especially in the, uh, over in LA and stuff. Oh my gosh. I mean that just, and they. The thing is those they're very aware of, um, the party. I don't know what you would call them. Let's just call them the porch party. Uh, the party people, the party planners, the organizers, the organizers, they're aware that we're aware of them.

And so they are getting trickier and trickier. I mean just how they book, um, how they have somebody come in as a family. And then as soon as, yeah. The host leaves, you know? Cause they, you can have, uh, uh, boots on the ground, a greeter for them and they still they're like, oh yeah, we're here for the weekend.

All right. We're all settled in. They've got their little suitcases and stuff. And then it's like, as soon as those people leave, they move the, you know, the, the DJ starts coming in the light. Crew. I mean, they, everything changes. It's amazing. I mean, these guys know, and they book places all along a route too.

So when one gets shut down, they move the party over to the next one. And over to the next one, we were just like, oh my gosh, these guys are like, They're like so organized they're professionals and, and that's, that's a reason that you want, you know, a, a solution that can be put in a locked closet, so they can't get to it because, you know, you say that the noise aware is tamper resistant.

Well, I can put a pillow. Over a noise where device and, and, and, uh, tape it to the ceiling and noise aware is not going to know. They're not going to know you, you really, that is another beauty of, uh, of the wifi approach. Yeah. I love the ping approach. Uh, Cox cable out in. Um, down in Tucson gave us an option of doing, uh, you know, monitoring the pings on it, but they, but you would have to have somebody monitoring your, your account.

You know, so like I know, so you're like, okay, well, are you guys going to send an email? And they're like, oh, we're setting that up now, but you can, you can, you know, you can have the option to do that. But it was a place that, where we had 10 units down there all in one place. And so we were putting the wifi in for the whole thing and, and the guy who said, oh, we have the ability to do this.

And I was like, man, I don't know what I would do with that. I'd have to have somebody watching it all the time. Well, that's, that's a part of the problem with, uh, most camera systems. You put a camera at the front door, but you only know if there's a party, if you're watching the people coming in. So exactly.

Yup. You have to make sure that somebody is there every time and you get back. It's old. That gets old. It's like hearing the ding ding. Well, w we're grateful for your, your interest in, in what we have. Absolutely. We would be delighted to have you try out one of our, uh, our devices. I would love to do that.

I would love to take a rebinding a couple more units. Well, my, um, My IRA is buying a couple more units down in Tucson, and we're all in this one area. And, uh, we've had a lot of success in there and maybe we'll just put some in there. That would be, that would be really great. The only thing I ever worry about is Tucson has, uh, that, that.

Internet goes out a lot there. And we noticed that because my guys are always getting the messages for that IE locks. It's like you're disconnected. You're connected. You're disconnected. You're connected. You're disconnected. If it, if it goes out intermittently, we won't tell you about it, but if it goes out for 15 minutes, Effectively when we lose conductivity, we start a timer.

And if you don't come back within 15 minutes, we say you've gone offline and we provide a notice, but if you're going on and off, we, that's not something that will disturb you with. Yeah, I love the fact that you can hide this in a closet and lock it away in your maid's closet because that's important. I mean, not allowing guests to tamper with stuff, they tamper with everything now.

I mean, we see it all the time and I mean, I'm constantly getting notices going. They covered, you know, they covered the cameras and this, you know, cause we have, uh, cameras on to our outside pool areas and stuff and it's like, you know, text them and tell them to remove it. And if you don't, then you're going to have to send security over there.

And you know what I mean? You're always like, you just tell your people all the time, but I'm like, man, I'm tired of paying for stuff. And then having it disconnected where it's like, yeah. Right. Well that's I didn't realize that that was such a. Such a common problem. So it's a problem that we can, uh, we address out of the box.

Yeah. That's pretty awesome. That's a really awesome, well, at least thank you. Cool.

Thank you. Thank you so much for your time. You too Elise. I appreciate you popping in. Yeah. Thank you for having me. Thank you bill again for your time. Nice talking with you too. You guys have a great day. Stay safe. All right. Bye bye. So that was our interview with William Evans and Elise Renarda from party squasher.

And I want to thank them for joining us what a great opportunity to learn more about this product. And remember if you have products like party squasher, you can go to your insurance company, and most likely you'll be able to get a discount just for having preventative measures. And if you are ever going in front of your HOA board or the city.

You can bring this in front of a judge and let them know, Hey, look, here's all the things that I am doing to prevent parties from occurring. And I hope this helps you a lot. Next week, we are going to be talking to stay fi and stay. Phi is a really great tool that we can use inside of our units that will NAB the emails of our guests and not just the guests that's booking.

All the guests who are logging into the internet. This is a great, great opportunity for you to start a list so that you can do your own marketing and that's imperative. It's going to save us a lot of money in the long run. It usually takes a couple years to set up a really good system like this. But this interview was amazing.

That's what we've got in store for you for next week. So stay tuned this week. We're going to be talking all about acquisitions on our replays. So the month of June is all about acquisitions on the replay. And I want you guys to take notes and take action. And remember if you go in right now, To our membership, you can get a trial that is going to include a nice little video lesson on the success path.

So you'll be able to start off with everyone else. I challenge you to do 30 days of nothing but acquisitions, listening and growing your company on Fridays. Make sure you tune in and listen to the acquisitions for the rest of this month. All right, I'll talk to you on Friday with the acquisitions and then we'll talk again on Monday.

We'll have stay fi here to tell you how you can NAB those email addresses from your guests. Thanks for listening up. Bless you. Have a great day. Go and grow.