The Homestays admin functions sit under a "Homestays" tab, alongside your other Off Campus admin tabs.

Clicking into the Homestays tab gives you an e row of tabs that you can use to access the various functions required to manage Homestays.

Placements

The Placements tab shows you placements that have been assigned by administrators or chosen by guests.

The right-hand side of the placements screen allows you to filter placements by type and date. In this screen shot, I'm viewing all the confirmed placements in the last week:

Guests

The Guests tab, shows you some overview information about guests including some stats about things that might need your attention. As with placements, you can filter on the right hand side. There's also a search box to quickly look up the guest you're interested in. I'll use it to look up a guest named "Mariano":

Here's Mariano's record. All the data shown is just for demonstration purposes, including the cartoon avatar. On your actual Homestays website, guests and hosts can upload a profile photo which is handy for putting a face to a name.

Homes

The Homes tab, as you might expect, shows information about host families and their homes. Notice you can filter by campus here, as well as by the status of the home. Also shown is the Export button which you'll recognise from your existing StudyStays admin. As with Off Campus, you can export your Homestays data to a spreadsheet if you need to do extra calculations or work with the data directly.

Here's an example of a host record. Up the top you can see there is the same area for notes that you're used to. You can also tag hosts to keep them organised. Tags come in handy for group auto-assignment—but more on that in a later post.

That's all for today! In tomorrow's post I'll share some ways you can save time by automating common Homestays tasks.

Today I’m very happy to announce the new Homestays add-on for StudyStays.

The Homestays add-on gives you a website for managing Homestay accommodation for international students. It fits in nicely alongside your existing Off Campus Accommodation website, making use of the admin interface that you’re already familiar with.

Some key features are:

• Guests (students) can apply for a homestay matching their preferences and requirements
• Hosts can self-manage their homestay, including details about living arrangements, features, preferences and availability
• Guests are matched with the best homestays for them using a scoring system.
• Guests can either request a homestay themselves, or have one assigned by an administrator
• Agents can manage homestays on behalf of their students
• Group bookings help you easily manage study or tour groups.
• Auto Assignment automatically assigns the best matches for groups
• Automatic email notifications to help streamline the application and placement process
• Comprehensive admin tools for managing guests, hosts, homestay placements, applications, agents and groups.
• Customisable forms (e.g. for Guest and Host registration) and scoring rules for matching guests with homestays
• Customisable to suit your procedures for recording host orientation, inspections and payments.
• Off Campus students and providers can use the same login for the Homestay website

The Homestays add-on has had almost two years of development and testing in collaboration with QUT and Griffith University. Thanks to their innovation and patience, we’ve gotten to the point where we have a solid product for other universities to use “out of the box”.

The Homestays add-on is available now for everyone using StudyStays. For anyone signing up in 2017, we have a special rate of $9000 for the first year (ex GST). There is also a “Light” version available with some limitations for a lower rate.

I’ll be writing in more detail about Homestays over the coming weeks. If you’d like to be notified about new posts, you can subscribe to this blog by email below. I look forward to telling you about all the exciting features!