Improved Insurance Detail Report, Email List Report, Third Party Alert Tweaks, and Faster SMS Forwarding!

Gratitude can transform common days into thanksgivings, turn routine jobs into joy, and change ordinary opportunities into blessings.

William Arthur Ward

As soon as Thanksgiving 🦃 is over and the leftovers are packed away, it seems like the world shifts into holiday mode. Despite the chaos of the season, it's important to step back and reflect on all of the things we're grateful for. After all, our customers drive us to push the limits and constantly improve OwnerRez. And our team is thankful 🙏 to have the opportunity to work in a vacation rental and software industry that is continually evolving.

As we enter this holiday season, let's all take a moment to reflect on the many things we have to be thankful for in our personal and professional lives. And while you are at it, take some time to review our coverage of the November 23rd release with eleven updates and November 29th release with four updates.

• Enhancements & Tweaks
  • Automatic Custom Fields for Duplicated Properties
  • Email List Report Updates 
  • Hosted & Portal Test Service
  • Insurance Detail Report Additions
  • Optimize Data Load via Query Results
  • SMS Messaging Voice Calls Can Now Go Directly To Voicemail
  • Third Party Alert Improvements
• Bug Fixes

Enhancements & Tweaks

Automatic Custom Fields for Duplicated Properties

Adding additional properties to your portfolio? Congratulations! OwnerRez users could duplicate properties for quite some time, but now when users duplicate a property, any property Custom Fields will automatically be duplicated and applied to your new property! 

Read our Adding New Properties and Custom Fields support articles to learn more about both.

Email List Report Updates 

Have great news to share with your past guests? Need to send out an email blast to all of your guests from the last year, last month, or even the next couple of months? Of course, OwnerRez has an Email List Report to assist our users with that! However, our email list report was initially built way back in the day and needed a couple of improvements for how most users would need to use it. We have made the default report period to be the current year and cleared the created before criteria. Additionally, we updated the Exclude Email Domains field to include vrbo.com (and alphabetized them). This function helps exclude any channel/platform email addresses, so your report only includes guests' real email addresses.

Optimize Data Load via Query Results

Did you know that OwnerRez logs slow queries? Yes, we do! By logging this information, OwnerRez can discover specific queries that we can improve - which impacts the speed of the OwnerRez app. Through this, we saw that we should optimize some, mainly the results for the main grids and ribbons (Booking, Quote, Inquiry, Contact, Properties), making OwnerRez load even snappier.

SMS Messaging Voice Calls Can Now Go Directly To Voicemail

Short Message Service (SMS), more commonly known as texting, is a powerful way to send information directly to your guests, bypassing or alongside email. Our premium SMS Messaging feature also works with templates and triggers so that you can send automated personalized messages at scheduled times. You can also receive texts or replies to the number you configure.

Well, guests (or others) can also dial that number. Depending on your settings, if you don't have it set to forward the call to another number it goes to voicemail. This improvement allows guests to leave you a voicemail without waiting for 6-7 rings to do so. So, if your Voice settings are not set up to go to a Forwarding Phone Number, voice calls that come in will now go to your configured voicemail box right away.

Want to learn more? Watch our SMS Setup & Usage support video.

Third Party Alert Improvements

OwnerRez has a nifty Third Party Alert feature where you can put in your cleaner's name/email address. The system will automatically email them whenever a booking is created, canceled, or changed dates. We've recently made some improvements to the Third Party Alert feature, including:

• Increased the email address length from 64 to 128 characters.
• Changed the heading to "Create Third Party Alert" when creating a new third-party alert.
• Status options to subscribe/unsubscribe will now only be available when editing an existing third-party alert.

To set a Third Party Alert, navigate to Properties > (select the property) > Third Party Alerts on the left navigation menu, as shown below.

Read the Third Party Alert section of the Bookings Display for Cleaners support article for more information.

Bug Fixes

Deleted Property Errors. Deleted OwnerRez properties generate errors because our channel partners don't know the property has been deleted, but a generic 500 error wasn't helpful to them. We have updated the specific error code to attach a "NotFound" reason.

Fix API Bookings Endpoint to Correctly Include Guest Names. OwnerRez has an API that users can use to pass data back and forth with third-party applications or their custom programs, and we noticed that our API v2 bookings were not including guest names. We have corrected this.

Fix "Accepted" Misspelling. In the OwnerRez Property Sharing section, the list of your properties had the Accepted column heading misspelled. We have corrected this typo.

Fix Duplicates in PM Owner Statement Expenses Report When Filtering for a Specific Property. When users generated a PM Expenses report with filtering for a specific property, the report generated duplicates. This error has been corrected.

Fix "Occurred" Misspelling. When OwnerRez users received a Crash Bang error message (which we hope you never have to see!), the word Occurred was misspelled. We have fixed this typo.

Fix Payment Entry Source Population. The Booking transactions Payment Entry Source transaction details automatically default to display "manually submitted by guest" with no IP address listed, which can confuse users. To clear up this confusion, Payment Entry details now include the date and time payment was collected and whether the following individuals made the payment:

• Manually submitted by guest at IP address
• Manually collected by you (meaning the OwnerRez user)

Fix Vrbo Refundable Damage Deposit Collected as a Booking Charge. This was an edge case that was affecting a tiny number of OwnerRez users, but we found that when OwnerRez users had Vrbo settings where the first payment was 100%, Vrbo was collecting Refundable Damage Deposit at the time of booking as a booking charge, instead of waiting until X days before arrival as configured in their rules.

Because of this, the separately scheduled security deposit was double-charging the refundable damage deposit! Then, when the automated security deposit refund occurred, it was only refunding the second charge (the one we scheduled) and not the initial Refundable Damage Deposit charge that Vrbo initiated.

This meant that each Vrbo guest was paying the Refundable Damage Deposit twice but only receiving the second Refundable Damage Deposit (the one we scheduled) back. We have resolved this issue and contacted the OwnerRez users that this has affected them so they can refund their guests accordingly.

OwnerRez Single Page Hosted Website Errors. If an OwnerRez user had deleted their hosted website reviews page, those websites were experiencing errors, including displaying the listing story on the website overview instead of on the headline. This has been resolved. 

Remove Double Scrollbars on Ribbon View. OwnerRez initially added bottom padding for improved readability, which caused the ribbon to create a double scrollbar even though it was originally designed for a single scrollbar. We have removed the bottom padding on the ribbon view entirely so that it uses the correct scroll on a desktop view.