HOST-IN

What does this business run on?

HOST-IN rents accommodation to workers and at the same time looks for property owners to work with. Those are two completely different groups that have to be reached separately — and both are scattered across listing portals rather than sitting in one place you can simply buy an ad on.

• A scattered source — rental listings sit on eight different portals at once, each with its own layout and its own way of hiding the phone number.
• A short window — with a flat to let, what counts is who gets in touch first. Going through the portals by hand takes half a day and part of the offers still slip away.
• Two paths on one site — the same website has to serve a company looking for beds for its crew and an owner who wants to let a property. One shared piece of copy will not work for both.

How did I solve it?

Instead of buying clicks, I built an in-house contact acquisition system — the same one described under the apps tab as Listing Monitor, only aimed at rentals.

• One list instead of eight tabs — listings from otodom, OLX, gratka, morizon, lento, sprzedajemy, CEIDG and direct ads flow into a shared view, with the phone number and email address pulled out of the text.
• Contact as soon as an offer appears — email and SMS campaigns run from a queue at their own pace, so the carrier does not read the traffic as spam.
• A funnel measured to the end — every contact has a stage and a due date for the next step, so you see not only how much went out but where it clogs.
• A site with two entrances — "I am looking for worker accommodation" and "I have a property and want to work together" as two separate paths from the first screen, without making anyone read an offer that is not theirs.

What came out of it?

The figures below are the state of the tool on the day this case was written — not averaged and not rounded up.

• 10,945 listings collected in the rental category, most of them from otodom (3,765), OLX (3,065) and gratka (1,849).
• 4,120 phone numbers and 896 email addresses extracted from the listing text — with no retyping by hand.
• 3,426 messages in the campaign aimed at agencies and worker accommodation, 147 replies, a reply rate of 4.3%.
• The funnel: 103 leads — 100 after email, 11 phone conversations, 5 meetings, 5 offers, 3 closed. The biggest drop is between the email and the phone call, and that is the place to work on, not the top of the funnel.

Why not ads?

In worker accommodation the ad auction is expensive, and it still reaches somebody who happens to be browsing — not the person who has just listed a property. An in-house tool costs once, runs every day and stays in the company together with the contact base. The same layer now serves a second company in the panel, without building everything again from scratch.

Two groups, two completely different questions

A company looking for beds for its crew and a flat owner who wants to let the property look at the same website from opposite ends. The first asks: how many places, from when, is there an invoice, and will somebody sort it out when something breaks. The second asks: who is going to live there, who pays, and what if the flat comes back damaged.

• For companies — accommodation for a team on secondment, on a contract or on a longer project: quickly, with an invoice, at a sensible price, with one point of contact instead of ringing round ten owners.
• For owners — guaranteed occupancy instead of worrying about empty months: tenants come from a base of companies already working with HOST-IN, not from an advert posted in hope.

That is why the site has no single shared "contact" button but two entrances placed side by side on the first screen. Each leads down its own path and nobody has to read an offer along the way that does not concern them.

Where does the contact come from?

In this trade it is not enough to wait for somebody to find the website. A flat to let appears on a portal and within hours it already has several calls — the one who gets in touch first, and says something concrete, wins.

• Collecting — listings from eight portals flow into one list, together with the number and address pulled out of the text.
• Scoring — every contact gets a quality score, so the sending starts with the ones worth having rather than going in order.
• Contact — email or SMS from a queue, at its own pace; the reply comes back to the same inbox and shows up next to the listing.
• Running it — from the first reply to the signature everything sits in one funnel, with a due date for the next step on every conversation.

What does this case say about the rest?

HOST-IN is interesting here because it shows the whole road in one place: a site that separates two audiences, a tool that delivers the contact, and a funnel that measures what came of it. It is the same layer that now serves a second company in the panel — built once, it works for the next one.