PriceLabs Increases Revenue and Saves Time for Property Managers: Agota Luksaite from Houseys

Customer type: Property Manager

Property Type: Short-Term Rental

Region: Europe

Products: Dynamic Pricing

Number of listings: 25-99

PMS: Beds.24

We sat down with Agota Luksaite from Houseys‘ to learn more about their companies journey, what brought them to PriceLabs and their experience so far.

Richie Khandelwal [PriceLabs]: Thank you so much for taking the time to catch up today! To kick start here, can you tell us a little bit about Houseys? Give us the back story!

Agota Luksaite [Houseys]: It’s a pleasure to be here. My colleague, Tomas, and I started working on Houseys in the spring of 2017. Tomas was already managing some properties with other partners. He and I started communicating because I was probably the only person in Vilnius who used technology to work on short term rental. I had a background in hotels. My family owns a bed and breakfast, so I have been doing property management since I was fourteen. 

We initially started as a business license in the spring of 2017, managing two apartments of which one was Tomas’s apartment. Initially, we were not interested in becoming a huge company. But then around the Spring of 2018 registered the company and we had about 40 properties then. By the end of 2019, we had grown to almost 80 properties!

In 2018, autumn, we applied to two startup accelerators. In Kaunas Startup accelerator Houseys got a special prize and drew attention of Cristobal Alonso – the head of Startup Wise Guys accelerator program.  We then applied to a Startup Wise Guys SaaS accelerator and were accepted to participate starting 2019 April 1st.

It was a three-month program where we learned a lot, and we decided that we want to grow and scale not just in Vilnius and Kaunas but grow out to go to other countries as well. So we have Latvia and Estonia in our plan and the rest of the CE region as well. 

In early 2020, we started to rationalize our portfolio because we wanted to get rid of the properties that were not fit for us. Now we’re kind of shifting a bit more to apart-hotels because that’s a lot easier to control and a lot more profitable. 

Recently, we’ve started doing webinars to share about the technology we are using with Vacation Rental owners in Lithunia. We also had Fausto from your team do a webinar to talk about revenue management software.

Richie: Wow, that’s a lot of positive momentum and growth! So Give us a sense of how big the team is now, and what is the plan post-Covid?

Agota: Now the team is down to four people, excluding the housekeeping department. The plan is to first go to the seaside. We already launched our first apartment in Palanga which is one of the resort cities on the shore and in the first night got reservations for 1900 eur. The ADR there is about five times bigger than Vilnius or Kaunas, which is good. And we’re opening an apart-hotel in Kaunas. Honestly, what I think I will be doing after this call is putting the apart-hotel on booking.com.

Richie: That’s so good to hear! I’m excited. I’ve never been to Lithuania, but I’ve seen some of your properties, and they are gorgeous. So, my next question – you started the company in 2017. And then you came to PriceLabs in the spring of 2018. What brought you to PriceLabs?

Agota: It’s a funny story that we had with Anurag. I found PriceLabs in the autumn of 2017. We were trying PriceLabs from many different accounts. I was turning it on and off, and Anurag reached out to me. 

What brought me to PriceLabs is I was just trying to learn more about revenue management. That wasn’t something that I knew as someone who studied it. I just had my background coming from this business. And since I was the one responsible for revenue in the company, I wanted to learn. I think it was in an Airbnb professionals group on Facebook that I found the keywords “dynamic pricing.” It wasn’t PriceLabs. It was just dynamic pricing.

So I started searching, and I found PriceLabs and some other ones. I began with PriceLabs, I liked it, and it worked for us. PriceLabs is the best dynamic pricing solution for Airbnb!

What we did is, we increased the revenue of apartments by up to 200%!