Success story
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Trey Spiller is the Director of Real Estate and Development at Cohost, a full life-cycle vacation rental management company that helps investors buy, operate, and sell short-term rental properties using data-driven insights.
Location: Colorado, US
Number of listings: 22
Using Hostfully since: 2020
Favorite features: Open API access, reliable multi-property management, clean API documentation
Hostfully’s open API gave us access to the data we needed to build our own analytics platform. It’s what allowed us to answer investor questions with real numbers instead of assumptions.
Cohost operates at the intersection of real estate and short-term rentals. Led by Director of Real Estate and Development Trey Spiller, the company helps investors identify properties, operate them as vacation rentals, and decide when the timing is right to sell. Cohost’s clients are sophisticated investors who expect data-backed answers, not intuition.
“Our investors don’t want guesses,” said Trey. “They want to see the numbers and understand why a strategy makes sense.”
Those questions fell into two categories. Investors wanted to know whether a property would perform better as a long-term or a short-term rental, and they wanted detailed operational metrics to justify the cost and value of professional management. Early on, the team could compile this information manually. As the portfolio and client base grew, that approach quickly became unsustainable.
“There was no single system that combined real estate metrics with vacation rental performance,” Trey said. “We were pulling data from everywhere and stitching it together by hand.”
Trey searched for a solution but found none. Traditional property management systems focused only on operations, while real estate tools ignored short-term rental performance. Faced with that gap, Trey decided to build the software Cohost needed.
Hostfully’s open API made that vision possible. Trey needed a platform that could reliably manage multiple vacation rentals while also exposing granular operational data through clean, well-documented endpoints. “Most systems keep that data locked away,” Trey said. “Hostfully didn’t.”
Using Hostfully as the operational backbone, Cohost built custom software that pulls vacation rental metrics directly from the Hostfully API. These include booking sources, occupancy rates, income and expenses by category, lead conversion, and even how often Cohost communicates with guests, a key indicator of time savings delivered to investors.
That data is combined with real estate metrics pulled from sources like Zillow. “Once we could merge those datasets,” Trey explained, “everything changed.”
The result is a single investor dashboard that shows income versus expenses, operational effort, and comparative performance between short-term and long-term rental strategies. Investors can see capitalization rate, cash-on-cash return, and internal rate of return, all calculated using live vacation rental data rather than estimates. The dashboard can also recommend whether to continue operating a property or sell it, based on projected equity gains versus rental income.
“When an investor logs in, they see exactly how the property is performing and exactly what we’re doing to manage it,” Trey said. “That level of transparency builds trust.”
Does Trey’s analytics tool sound interesting? Let’s talk.
Cohost’s custom platform became a competitive advantage. Instead of answering investor questions one by one, the data is always available and up to date. Advisors can focus on strategy rather than reporting, and investors can make faster, more confident decisions.
“Hostfully gave us the flexibility to build software around our business model, not the other way around,” Trey said. “That’s what allowed us to merge real estate and vacation rental metrics into one clear picture.”