From the outside, Ukio may seem like a simple short-term rental business. But behind the scenes, there is a complex tool being built that cements Ukio as a true proptech company.

The Property Management System, as it is called internally, is an all-in-one platform that helps the company manage all the property assets, how we market them on the Ukio website, and the guests who rent them out. It is an area where any information needed to learn about an apartment, on pricing, or on a client booking can be accessed easily and quickly.

Today, the platform is developed specifically for Ukio’s internal use. It is divided into three sub-tools, designed for different parts of the property and booking journey:

• Apartment Management System
• Booking Management System
• Revenue Management System

Read on below to get insights on each of these sub-platforms and how they benefit not only our internal teams but also the customer experience and journey.

Apartment Management System (AMS)

What is it?

The single source of truth for all information related to the apartments. In this tool, data such as property contract terms, building conditions, apartment features, and more can be found.

Why the need for it?

Throughout the lifecycle of an apartment, from onboarding to renting it out to guests, it goes through many teams’ hands. Each team adds a layer of information that eventually leads to what is seen by the customer on the website. As Ukio scales and the number of apartments grows from 500 to 5,000, the need for a tool to properly manage all the assets is vital.

How does it serve internal and external stakeholders?

The primary internal stakeholders of the AMS are the Real Estate Acquisition, Onboarding, and Design teams. Their job is to fill in key information about each apartment until it is “guest ready.”

The sales team uses AMS information to sell an apartment for rent. Key features like number of bedrooms, square footage, terrace space, and building floor, and available amenities like type of heating mechanism, pool access, and concierge service all form part of the data customers need to know. All this information needs to be available and easily accessible for an efficient sales process.

The operations team also makes use of this information, especially regarding maintenance topics. The AMS holds information on appliance models, user manuals, and utility providers. When something goes wrong, relying on accurate information on the AMS allows the operations team to solve problems at a much quicker pace.

For customers, the AMS is the primary tool that allows them to see all the apartment information on the website. Filters like apartment name and number of bedrooms are controlled by data from the AMS. As the website continues to develop, more filters will be added

Future developments

• Stock inventory integration: capability to understand investment in furniture, depreciation, and instant replacement.
• Property owner management: foster relationships through automated reports on the conditions of apartments and usage statistics.
• Maintenance automation: detect damages and problems for quick and efficient repair.

Booking Management System (BMS)

What is it?

The central hub for processing all customer bookings. This tool is where we maintain records on guest information, booking details, and payment schedules. Similar to the AMS, the BMS serves as a single source of truth that various departments can depend on to manage bookings. With the BMS, the entire lifecycle of a booking is recorded, from reservation conditions all the way through payment handling.

Why the need for it?

The purpose of developing the BMS was to simplify access to information regarding a booking at any stage of its customer lifecycle. Additionally, it is a means for the teams to better know and understand the customers. By doing so, booking requests like extensions, cancellations, or apartment changes can be executed quickly.

How does it serve internal and external stakeholders?

Across internal teams, the biggest benefit of the BMS has been to respond to inquiries and issues at a faster pace. Depending on the type of guest, whether they are B2C or B2B, the booking process can be adapted to cater to their needs.

The B2B sales team is one that has benefited from the development of the BMS. Between managing who is the actual guest, who is the payer, and who should be invoiced, the BMS has helped the team separate these three data points and deliver a smoother experience to each of the end customer.

Future developments

• Guest portal & app: ability to give control to the guest to manage their bookings autonomously.
• Catering to B2B necessities: easing access to our partners to book for their clients and making payments and invoicing flexible.

Revenue Management System (RMS)

What is it?

The RMS is the platform built specifically for the Revenue team to manage pricing. Through the platform, pricing decisions and changes can be made at scale and automated for efficiency.

Why the need for it?

With the number of apartments increasing every month, managing dynamic pricing decisions for each property proved to be difficult and time-consuming. The number of pricing requests from sales was also increasing, and the previous manual calculation process was not sustainable.

How does it serve internal and external stakeholders?

For the Revenue Pricing team, the RMS is the primary platform for their day-to-day tasks. Apart from managing property prices, they are able to analyze revenue and margins on the platform, giving them insights on how to adapt prices. With the RMS, they can also collect data from external and internal sources and integrate that into their pricing decisions.

For the sales team, price quotation requests to the Revenue team are responded to much quicker and with more flexible options, translating to a quicker response time to clients.

Future developments

• 3rd party integrations: ability to manage prices of our apartments on other platforms and channels.
• Payment methods: increasing the number of ways clients can pay for their booking, whether that is through Paypal or direct debit.
• Artificial intelligence: adopting AI learning models to automate price changes based on occupancy, seasonality, and consumer behaviour.

With the continued growth of Ukio, the Property Management System that exists today is only the beginning of what can be a versatile tool for property managers.

We may be just an apartment rental business today. But with the development of this tool, the future holds a lot more for Ukio.

Developing the Technology Behind Ukio was originally published in Ukio Newsroom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Comprehending the financials of a scaling company can offer clear indications of its potential success and growth. As Ukio takes on the challenges of disrupting the real estate and rental markets in Europe, having a robust and durable financial strategy is key. We sat down with Ukio’s Chief Financial Officer, Rafael Peixoto, to discuss the company’s current state of affairs and the industry trends that can impact its future.

Rafael originally hails from Brazil. His passion for finance has taken him on a journey across different sectors and locations. Starting his career in private equity, he has taken on stints in consumer goods, SaaS, and healthcare in the Middle East, Africa, and the UK. Prior to joining Ukio, he was part of both an IPO and the sale of a distribution company to a private equity fund.

Outside the office, Rafael can be found rock climbing, spending time with his wife and cat, and barbecuing with friends in true Brazilian fashion. Read on to hear his thoughts and insights.

What is your assessment of Ukio today?

Ukio has a very robust business model that delivers fast growth year over year while having high margins on each apartment. As any startup, we consume cash to accelerate growth and to invest in our team and our processes. I believe our proposition to our guests combined with our healthy unit economics will allow us to generate a lot of value.

Every company goes through stages, and we’re at the point where we’ve already proven our business model: we’ve built the foundation and already have amazing people in-house who are driving more growth. Now, to accelerate that growth, we need to reinforce controls and processes, and finance plays an important role in that.

What are the top priorities you are tackling within the finance department?

There are three main things that we are working on:

1. Building foundations: We are ensuring that our processes, routines, controls, compliance, and frameworks are how we need them to be for sustainable growth.
2. Raising capital: Securing our next round of funding is key. That means supporting the founders and management team to onboard amazing investors who share our vision when we see that the time is right.
3. Driving vision: Finance has an important role to bring visibility to the company and hold us all accountable. We’re working on improving the way we do budgets, the way we do cost control, and helping the supply team and sales team in making sure all deals they close make sense for us.

What are the key metrics you track to evaluate the company’s financial situation?

The Ukio business is simple and easy to understand, but hard to execute. We have to balance growth, which we measure through the number of apartments and sales levels, and unit economic profitability, which we measure by our gross margin per apartment and per booking. This is all while watching our cash burn and ensuring that our cash flow supports our growth trajectory.

Artificial intelligence is all the rage right now. Are you looking to implement AI-based technologies at Ukio?

In one of my previous companies, one of our core products was an AI technology to drive efficiency in FMCG execution, so I had the opportunity to spend some time studying AI.

There is a big opportunity for Ukio with AI, but we are in the part of the journey where we first have to lay down our foundations and make sure that all our systems are communicating together; that our main back office software is connected properly with our ERP, which is then connected properly with our CRM.

Once these dataflows are working properly, we will focus on driving further efficiency with AI.

What are the financial and non-financial risks you see in the real estate sector, and what are the strategies you are implementing to mitigate these risks?

There are three big risks that we are always monitoring at Ukio.

1. Getting into bad deals: It is crucial to have discipline and focus surrounding the right KPIs when analyzing a real estate deal. Our supply team performs a thorough analysis to ensure that each apartment we add makes financial sense. Our legal team then ensures that our contracts are strong enough to protect us.
2. Geographical risk: In some markets, we’re exposed to the risks of changes in regulation. In that sense, it’s important to be close to local authorities and understand the impacts of any change. We establish a productive work relationship with local communities and show how Ukio adds value to their cities.
3. Execution risk: Mitigating this risk is all about having the right compliance, processes, and routines. Routines that check not only whether we are doing the right thing, but also measure and drive the performance of our teams.

What are some things you find most interesting or different about finance in the real estate sector versus some of the other industries you’ve worked in?

The core principles of finance remain the same across different industries; we just have to take into consideration the particularities of each business. Personally, I think the beauty of our sector comes from its simplicity, which allows us to model it with a high level of accuracy.

When I was in the healthcare sector, we used to serve around 22 million customers every year. While you can do a lot of modeling on that, you cannot be as granular while maintaining accuracy the way we can with 1,000 or even 5,000 apartments.

The real estate sector is very traditional, but Ukio is trying to change this by having a more well connected network. How will this impact finance and make business transactions easier?

A lot of our customers are from younger generations and they have different expectations than before. For example, they pay for an Uber with their phone, and if they cancel, they get an instant refund. This low-friction economy leads to a different standard for how finance processes should work.

In real estate, traditionally, it takes time to get a security deposit back. It takes time to confirm a reservation. It takes time to get to know your customers. So we have to adapt to provide what this new customer, this new generation, is expecting from us while not compromising on compliance.

Do you see a demand for Ukio’s business in regions like North America, Latin America and Asia?

There is still much more growth to tap into in Europe, with London being an obvious one, along with several other big cities. But there are opportunities outside of Europe as well. I’m from Brazil where, in cities like Rio de Janeiro, it’s super tough to get a good apartment in a nice area for a reasonable price. And that is where you have high demand from people, especially young professionals looking to move there.

I believe that this is a problem that is not unique to the cities we operate in nowadays. It’s not unique to Europe, and we still have a lot of space to grow in Europe before we decide to diversify to other continents. But problems like housing affordability and the limited availability of homes happen everywhere. And that is something Ukio helps solve.

Eager to join the Ukio team? Check out our open positions.

Executive Spotlight: CFO Insights with Rafael Peixoto was originally published in Ukio Newsroom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This March, Ukio achieved a major milestone with the signing of its 1,000th apartment. In just under four years of operations, it has been a rapid expansion of managed properties across five cities: Barcelona, Madrid, Lisbon, Berlin, and Paris.

For CEO and co-founder Stanley Fourteau, this growth was faster than he envisioned or expected when he founded Ukio in 2020 with his brother Jeremy:

“Reaching this milestone is something we are so proud of. We have a vision of being the world’s leading and most loved housing brand and we are one step closer to reaching that goal. We believe we’re still in day one and we want to grow to ten, even a hundred thousand apartments. But today we are very happy and excited to be where we are.”

From the very first apartment in Barcelona, named “Pipa,” it has been a tough but rewarding journey to get to this point. Stan and Jeremy look back on how it was to be on the ground making things happen. Whether it was performing construction themselves or touring potential customers, it was the full end-to-end experience of building a company. Experiences that make them understand and appreciate the work done by current Ukio employees, they say.

Today, Ukio’s property growth is driven by a xx-strong team of real estate business developers led by Renan Trzesniowski, VP of Business Development. Each city consists of its own squad responsible for scouting apartments, creating strong relationships with property owners, and sharing the value that Ukio delivers.

For Renan, his team’s biggest win has been the ability to standardize knowledge, ways of working, and means of interaction with landlords. This was key because the real estate sector operates differently in each city, from cultural particularities to legislation. For the business development team to move at a fast and effective pace, consistency was needed.

Another key factor is the community of landlords that have come to trust in Ukio’s capabilities to manage their apartments. That trust has served as a network effect, attracting more property owners and making scalability more efficient. In fact, this has led to Ukio managing 15 building complexes and all the apartments in them.

In celebration of this milestone, the thousandth property, which so happens to also be located in Barcelona, will be aptly named “MILLE” meaning “thousand” in Latin. The apartment will be designed in a special and unique way and will be furnished with a commissioned item to commemorate its significance.

As for the future of Ukio, there is no plan to stop growing. Whether it’s increasing the number of apartments in the cities we are in or expanding to new locations, this is simply the beginning.

However, the team ensures that this growth will not come at the expense of the quality and service provided. As Renan puts it:

“Quality over quantity is the most important to us in the ability for us to grow at a standard level, and be true and positive to the community that we operate in. That standard is what will truly make us a great and standout company, whether it’s for the landlords that work with us or the guests that choose to come stay with us.”

For Stan, getting to 1,000 was the hard part. As Ukio continues to improve how they do things, create a stronger brand, and maintain a powerful community of real estate stakeholders, reaching 5,000 will be easy. Getting to 10,000 apartments, even easier.

Stay tuned.

Ukio Hits the 1,000 Apartments Milestone was originally published in Ukio Newsroom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After months of work, Ukio’s new website look is now live!

This new design was done to better reflect the brand that Ukio wants to impress upon its customers and improve the user experience as they navigate the webpage. With this update, not only have the homepage, results pages, and property pages received a fresh view, but technical specs like load speed have also improved.

From a visual perspective, it was important that site visitors get an immediate sense of what Ukio has to offer. Our apartments come in different designs and styles, and the customer should be able to get a sense of that from seeing the many images.

On the functional side, one of the bigger additions is the search bar on the homepage. This makes it easier to filter by city and stay dates. On the results page, filter bars were also redesigned for ease and accessibility. Another major improvement is the inclusion of a map on the results page, giving users an idea of where an apartment is located within the city.

Other pages of the website were given a fresh look, specifically the “Landlords” and “Ukio for Business” pages. These two pages are targeted at key stakeholders of the business and were updated to provide specific information and value to these target audiences.

The website redesign is a process that began in June 2023. It was spearheaded by the Product team in collaboration with Marketing.

In doing so, the teams went through a period of research and user testing to understand what created the best user experience for the customer. Key elements of functionality, performance, and branding were taken into account in the final designs.

Check out the new website now at www.ukio.com.

Presenting the New and Improved Ukio Website was originally published in Ukio Newsroom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ukio is no longer a startup.

It is a realization the founders and employees have come to as we bouldered through 2023. Not only were we growing, we were growing fast!

In summary, we welcomed over 4,500 guests from 3,710+ bookings, more than doubling the previous year. This translated to 229,000 nights and generated us €25 million in revenue. Taking into account seasonal lows in certain cities, we maintained a 93% average occupancy rate throughout the year, a tremendous feat that sits above the industry standard of 87%.

On the supply side, we added 480 apartments, bringing our year-end total to 920. This included 15 buildings where Ukio manages all properties.

With operations on a larger scale, getting to know our guests, partners, and landlords continued to be a top priority. Whether it was through events, reviews or customer interviews, we continued to hear stories of empowerment and inspiration from people looking to explore life in new destinations. This is a true testament to Ukio’s mission to let people live where they want and to provide them with that feeling of “home.”

Here are some key moments that contributed to Ukio’s success in 2023.

Expansion to Paris

After three years dominating the Iberian Peninsula, it was time to plant our roots in other parts of Europe, beginning with the launch of operations in Paris. As one of the busiest hubs in Europe and driven by the combined housing needs of business travelers, tourists, and students, it made sense as our next destination.

We started the year with only five apartments but quickly multiplied that tenfold. True to forecasts, Paris proved to be a strong market where we achieved a 90% average occupancy for the year and with revenue margins consistently above €3,000, the highest across all cities.

With the upcoming Paris Olympic Games in 2024, we see travel and demand for housing in the city only increasing, offering us a great opportunity to build strong brand awareness.

Building B2B

Although we had grown organically through individual travelers, we began to see an increasing trend of relocation agencies and corporate accounts contacting us. Alongside the fact that bookings for business-related travel grew over 200% year-on-year, it was a clear signal that a dedicated B2B sales team was needed to capture this increasing demand.

From a team of three at the beginning of the year, we ended 2023 with a team of ten: a Head of B2B Sales and dedicated account executives and BDRs for each market. We created clear value propositions, accelerated partner prospecting, and solidified relations through partner events.

Through their work, we closed over 350 partnerships with relocation agencies, production companies, corporations, and other work groups, and ended 2023 with 32% of total bookings coming from the B2B network. In 2024, we aim to increase this to 50%.

New Tech Developments

A vital element of our business growth has been the development of a Property Management System. The product is focused on our own internal use for now and will change the way we manage our apartments and the booking process for speed and efficiency.

The product is divided into three parts:

• Apartment Management: A single source of truth for all details pertaining to our properties. From apartment onboarding to design, this will serve as a data repository for all things related to our assets.
• Booking Management: Improving the user experience on our website for direct bookings, including subsequent actions like identity confirmation and stay extensions.
• Pricing and Payment: Optimizing the way we deal with price setting, price changes, payment processing, and more. Through this development, we aim to be more transparent with customers over the prices and charges they see.

Today, we may not consider ourselves a pure proptech company. But the software we are building can one day be a tool for any property operator.

Operations Team Restructure

Another sign that we were growing in number of apartments and guests was the need to re-think how our Operations team operated. In November, we restructured one single team into three sub-teams:

• Home Operations: The team responsible for getting apartments guest-ready alongside the Design team. They manage all renovations and design work.
• Guest Operations: This team manages the maintenance and cleaning of our apartments, ensuring that everything in-home runs smoothly.
• Guest Experience: A team dedicated solely to guest communications. They ensure that any queries, complaints, and needs are responded to in a timely manner and pass information on to other relevant departments.

With this new organizational structure, we aim to truly provide a 5-star experience to our customers through exceptional service.

Leadership Hires

When we raised our Series A in November 2022, the need came to professionalize how we were running teams. We needed experienced leaders to come in and take our ways of working to the next level.

We accomplished that by hiring VPs for the Sales and Supply functions and appointing the former Onboarding Lead to VP of Operations. Alongside our founders, VP of Design, VP of Engineering, and Chief of Staff, they comprise Ukio’s current executive team.

As we take on 2024, this is a great opportunity to give appreciation to all the stakeholders that have contributed to Ukio’s success.

To all employees who work tirelessly and with determination. They truly exemplify Ukio’s core values and live them day-to-day.

To our business partners and guests who continue to give life to our vision to be the world’s most trusted housing brand.

And finally, to our 800+ landlords who have placed their trust in us. This year, we will mark an important milestone by reaching 1,000 apartments and this would only be possible with their support.

Ukio is definitely not a startup anymore. And that just makes the journey all the more exciting.

2023 Year in Review was originally published in Ukio Newsroom on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.