Case Study: Cohost automates investor dashboards and rental analytics with Hostfully's open API

How a startup used the Hostfully API to build third-party vacation rental management software

Cohost is a full life‑cycle vacation rental management company that combines real‑estate expertise with custom software to serve sophisticated investors. As Cohost scaled, founders needed to answer detailed investor questions—short‑ vs. long‑term rental economics and granular operational/performance metrics—but found no off‑the‑shelf PMS with an open API to feed their analytics. They used Hostfully’s property management platform and open API to access the rental data they required.

Using the Hostfully API, Cohost built a custom dashboard that merges Hostfully rental metrics with Zillow real‑estate data to show communications, booking sources and conversion, occupancy, income and expenses, and financial metrics like Cap Rate, Cash‑on‑Cash and IRR. Hostfully’s open API enabled automated imports of bookings, fees, guest messaging, cleaning jobs and more, eliminating manual reporting, scaling Cohost’s operations, and giving investors real‑time, measurable insights to compare short‑ vs. long‑term returns and time sales decisions.

Cohost

Trey Spiller

Director of Real Estate and Development