RDFO
Owners Helping Owners (OHO) Information

Welcome to the RDFO Owners Helping Owners (OHO) Information Page. OHO is a system that RDFO has developed which will allow owners in the same area to correspond with each other and also send referrals to each other.The RDFO OHO Referral Network is totally voluntary. RDFO simply supplies the infrastructure to facilitate owners in routing referrals to each other. Currently, OHO is free to all registered RDFO members. We have no plans of changing this policy.

The RDFO OHO system is totally automated and has the following features:

Owners can create their own Referral Network .
Owners can join the Referral Network which corresponds to their area.
Owners may remove themselves from a Referral Network.
Owners enter referrals via a very simple interface (web page).
Once a referral is entered the RDFO system will analyze the calendars of everyone in your network. An email will be sent to all the owners who have availability. In addition, an email will be sent to the potential renter with the information of all the owners who have availability.
Owners who submit referrals can go to a web page and get information about all the referrals they have submitted. This is very useful for contacting potential renters in the future. We have found that a lot of people tend to vacation in the same area every year. This is especially true with ski and beach resorts.
Owners can easily send an email to all the other owners in their Referral Network.
As of 4/1/2006, the person who created a referral network can mark it as private. A private network is blocked from allowing other owners to join it and certain statistics are blocked from public view. This feature was requested by a couple of owners because they only wanted a few of their close friends in the network. In general, we recommend you keep your networks public. However, the process of making your network private or public is fully automated so you can change it at any point in time.

OK, so you might be asking, why in the world would I want to send referrals to my neighbors, aren't they my competition?Well, that is one way to look at it. However, if you don't have availability, wouldn't you rather your customer find a vacation rental in YOUR area instead of the resort down the road? Believe it or not, your real competition is the management companies and the other destinations that your customers may be considering. In addition, owners might consider paying a referral fee to the person who submitted the referral for all referrals that result in a rental. This is something the owners need to discuss and agree to among themselves.Forming a network of fellow owners can be a very powerful tool. Owner's need to be in touch with each regarding things that are going on in their community and probably within their own HOA.We did a trial of this system with a group of condo owners in Keystone Colorado. Some of them were skeptical at first. However, that quickly changed once they found how truly valuable this concept is.

Some of the Keystone users had their own referral network going on. However, they quickly found that going to all the other owner's web page and checking their calendars was a real hassle. For those who didn't take the time to check the other owner's calendars they just blindly sent the referrals to everyone. This caused lots of owners to get lots of emails and they were quickly overwhelmed. The automated calendar checking of the RDFO OHO system solved both of these problems.

To check out the interface, please go to here.