'The market's bubbling' - Airbnb firm hopes to double over next 12 months

Ollie Krol set up the The Good Host around four years ago with his friend, John Ellison, after he had booked a six-month trip to Colombia and encountered the problem of what to do with his house.

He’d been living in it – a two-bed terrace, situated in NR3 – for around eight years and didn’t want to put everything into storage, so John, an American, suggested he “Airbnb it”.

Ollie says he thought it was a brilliant idea but knew that, thousands of miles away, he wouldn’t be able to keep up with the work, such as responding to messages or sorting out snags.

“So we agreed he’d run it for me for some help and I’d give him a share of the income, as a sort of trial,” Ollie explains. “We did it for six months and within the first 24 hours, we were booked for 30 nights consecutively and the market looked really impressive.

“It was good for me because I was earning some money to spend in Colombia, it was good for John because he was earning money for being in the UK, and it meant I solved the problem with my house, where I could leave all my bits and bobs in here and leave it as my home, and it would be looked after and cleaned and actually maintained.”

Ollie Krol, who set up The Good Host, with his friend, John, in 2018/9 (Image: Ollie Krol)

By the time Ollie had returned from South America, the pair’s activity had sown the seed for a new business, an Airbnb management service that could provide Norwich – and its homeowners – with short-term rentals.

Other projects already existed in bigger cities, but there was nothing like it in Norwich. “No one seemed to do what I needed at the time,” says Ollie. “No one seemed to offer a management service, so there was a gap in the market. The opportunity was ripe.”

One weekend, the pair decided to set up their new business, The Good Host, using John’s skills in tech – he’d previously worked in Silicon Valley – and Ollie’s operational know-how – he was, at the time, a paramedic. Over the weekend, they went from a successful pilot to creating a fully operational company.

Since then, the pair has created a team, established the firm’s own software and systems and now operates at scale, with around 10 properties in their portfolio and looking to grow.

Ollie says he and John are uniquely placed, as both investors and customers of the company. “We both service our own properties as part of our full portfolio,” he explains. “So we know the financial needs of our customers, how our customers need to feel looked after, and we also, through being customers, understand the market and what the company needs to do to change and adapt and also serve both the guests and the customers.

“Trialling it for the first six months in a property which I owned, and I knew inside out, was a great opportunity to learn what can go wrong, what types of people we sometimes get and how to do customer care and respond to guests’ needs. It was a great kind of job interview, really.”

The business effectively has two types of customers: the guests who come to stay and the clients who trust The Good Host to manage their properties. The Good Host takes a 20pc cut of the net income, but positions itself as an alternative to the sort of assured shorthold tenancy agreement you would get with a traditional estate agent.

“Our vision as a company is always to try to win our customers 30pc more than an assured shorthold tenancy,” says Ollie. “That’s always been a figure in mind and we consistently exceed that.”

Most of the stays are short-term, three to seven days, but occasionally their one-bedroom flats get longer-term bookings. For property owners, the team handle everything, from listing and promoting the property to liaising and taking care of guests, as well as handling payment and managing the check-in and check-out.

They also recruit a team of housekeepers and cleaners, maintain the property and fix any snagging issues. It is, by all accounts, a finely tuned machine, with most of the hard work done in a six-hour turnaround window between one guest leaving and another arriving.

But even after the guest has left, Ollie says the work continues, as the team has developed software and systems to analyse – and then respond – to guests’ feedback.

“We never want feedback to happen twice because it shows we’ve missed something. That’s why people can’t do it themselves – because there’s so much work involved. You couldn’t do a good job with an Airbnb yourself and it not take over your life because guests have exceptionally high standards and their expectations are incredibly high. They are paying a lot of money and it needs to be right.

“That’s why we are a professional company delivering all that work, so that when it goes to plan it looks like it’s really easy, but it only looks really easy because we’ve spent years honing our skills – and making mistakes and learning from them and unpicking what we’ve done. That’s where we earn our money and why guests check in and have a great stay – it’s because we’re getting the basics right.”

But in the current climate, getting the basics right has become about more than just logistics. It’s about ethos and brand, too. The Good Host celebrates the city – and the county more widely – and aims to not only
be a welcoming host to those who stay, but to do good too.

Ollie says he is also “acutely aware” of the wider issues around short-term rentals – including the argument that services like Airbnb can reduce housing stock, resulting in fewer houses for those who need permanent accommodation.

But he also believes that the model can give back, too. “My dream is that guests come to Norwich and live like a local. We have a guest guide in every single property, where we signpost guests to, in our opinion, the best coffee houses, restaurants, bars, activities, sights and so on,” says Ollie.

“All of our contractors, all of our team, are from Norwich and our guests are encouraged actively to eat from the market, drink delicious coffee from our favourite coffee houses, buy food from Norwich independents and try to stimulate the local economy and give back to a wonderful city which has served me very well and still does, as time goes on.

“It’s a business and a commercial activity, but fundamentally, we just want people to have a nice time. The nice thing about really knowing the area is you can give very targeted advice for people who sometimes get in touch and ask for things like ‘we want to go to the woods, we want to go to the beach, we want to eat Japanese food’ – homing in on local independent and little beauty spots that only locals know is quite a nice thing, actually.”

The Good Host is environmentally conscious, too. Its team of cleaners, which it contracts out, are coached to used non-chemical and sustainable products, including recycled toilet tissue. “All of our properties have bulk orders of consumables, so instead of buying loads and loads of little shower gels, we buy five litres of it once a year and have refillable glass containers,” Ollie says.

“All the time we’re thinking around how can we try to make this as green as possible while still consuming energy, so we’ve migrated our customers on to carbon neutral energy suppliers like Bulb and Octopus and we take a property and mould it in the vision we hold as a company of trying to be as ecologically friendly as possible.”

Since its inception, Ollie says The Good Host has grown “organically”. They have a range of properties on their books – including a 10-bed home and a selection of mid-size houses – but are now looking for more.

Last year was their busiest year on record as Covid travel restrictions meant a massive change to how people traveled. “People are learning how to love the country they live in again,” he says. “Norfolk has been, pre- and including the Victorian times, a holiday destination. The market’s great, the market’s bubbling and people want to come and holiday in Norfolk
and Norwich. The beauty about Norwich is that it doesn’t have the volatility the coast does. We’re more than 90-95pc full all year, whereas the coast is 100pc full and then has months of spaciousness.”

Ollie says the goal, now, is to double the firm’s portfolio over the next 12 months – as long as they can keep to the same high standard. “My vision is open-ended as long as we can still be excellent,” he says. “It isn’t how many properties, it’s ‘how good are we being?’ The metric for us is ‘can we be excellent at what we do?’ and if we’re being excellent then we can grow.”

For more information, visit www.thegoodhost.co.uk

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