Goals for 2009

Despite the final 7-6 record, 2008 certainly ended up being a fun year. We tried to build a better mouse trap for people looking to find accommodations for football weekends and we certainly did something right because we managed to book more than 100 home rentals and make lots of people happy. But that's not good enough. People can always be happier, and the happier our clients are, the better we think we'll do.

So to that end we decided we'd share our 2009 Company Goals with everyone:

1. Provide best in class service to our Notre Dame clients
2. Gain majority market share in Notre Dame
3. National Domination (yeah we're going to expand to more markets, but more on that some other time)

We think our existing platform at www.GamedayHousing.com is doing a great job at making goals 1 & 2 happen, but to accomplish goal 3 we're going to have to spend some major capital and time... but more on that later.

Right now we're trying to figure out how we can measure goals 1 & 2. To do so we're trying to look at the market and give ourselves an honest appraisal. As we see it, our clients, whether they're the kind that has a home or the kind that needs a place to stay, have a few marketplaces they can visit:

1. Craigslist.com - The ultimate classified ad platform. We love craigslist and use it to help bring traffic to www.GamedayHousing.com. We do so for many of the reasons that homeowners might - craigslist is free. It never "hurts" to list one's home on craigslist.com, but it takes a big leap of faith for a renter to trust that the home they find on a free service like craigslist is going to actually be there when they arrive. We can't measure how many people actually rent a home they found on craiglist, but if you have please let us know how your experience went.

2. Homeaway.com, Vrbo.com, Vacationrentals.com, etc. - The paid classifieds. Back when Gameday Housing was just three company owned homes we listed with one of these services. The cost was $300 and we didn't get a single booking from the service, though we got a lot of suspect emails from people with weird names. We also had to use our own contracts and payment processing systems. We didn't renew due to bad results.

From our point of view, these services don't provide a "turn key" solution for property owners, and don't provide any protection for renters. How can a renter know whether the home won't be double booked by a unscrupulous land lord? How does he know the home will even be there when he arrives? Still we get it - this is a good service for people who have a home, know how contracts work, have a way to accept multiple forms of payment, who live in a high traffic area, and who don't need help with the little things like key boxes, welcome books, etc. But is there anything else we're missing?

3. Build your own website - Why not? We did! We found that our website helped legitimize our cragislist ads. Our renters were also happy with our website because they could email links to the other fans in their group to get the approval to rent. Unfortunately we also rapidly found that it was hard to get traffic, but that's what word of mouth, friends, and craigslist.com are for. So the website cost a lot of money and time to manage, and we were fortunate enough to have a web designer as a partner. The trade off was we probably booked at higher rates and for more games than if we had just relied on craigslist.

4. Real Estate Agents - We've never done this or heard of anyone who has. If you have please let us know how it went!

There's a lot of information for us to analyze, and analyze we will. Please be on the lookout for stats where we monitor the market for football weekend rentals. Going forward we plan to keep a tally of rentals we've booked, total homes available on our website, and lodging rates we observe throughout the market. We'll also try and capture how many homes are listed on the web for each ND home game. Crazy we know...