Welcome back to the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast. I’m happy you’re here again. Remember, way back when, over 10 years ago when Airbnb was easy, a lot of people didn’t even know what Airbnb was. If you’re considering getting into short-term rentals in 2026, well, things are way different than it was 10 years ago. So today we’re doing something a little bit fun. We’re taking a trip down memory lane, going all the way back to when I used to stay in Airbnb’s over a decade ago. The way things used to be and the reality the way things are today.

I also have one really counterintuitive reality that you have to follow today to do a good job with your short-term rentals. And it was much, much different back in the past, and actually it’s almost flipped a hundred percent. So stay tuned. Let’s dive in all that as we take a trip down memory lane.

10 years ago on Airbnb, it was all about connection and feeling how it would be to actually live in other people’s properties. So yeah, you saw their personal photos in there. They met you at the door, they gave you a guided tour of the property and their cell phone number, and they were messaging you constantly.

You became friends perhaps.

Having that personal connection with the host led to really great reviews. The reality is today most guests want the opposite.

Most guests are looking for a smart lock so they can check in and not have to talk to anyone. This is the reality. Maybe they’re coming from a long trip. They just want to check in. They want to know that everything is exactly how they imagine it. Everything is exactly how you portrayed. On your Airbnb listing, there is no more exchanging communication with your host 

Nope. Today guests are looking for much what they look for when they stay at a hotel. Now, yes, there’s a couple little caveats here. Maybe you have a extremely luxurious property and you’re acting as a concierge. Well, that is a little bit different, but I’m talking about the majority, the 90% of all short-term rentals out there.

Your guests are looking for some detailed check-in instructions. Timely check-in instructions, really quick responses, but only when they want to talk to you.

So a lot of that personal interaction today is gone. Why has this happened? Well, quite simply, it’s just been a cultural change with Airbnb and the industry.

Early Airbnb guests like myself were looking for adventures. We were looking for unique stays that we couldn’t find anywhere in hotels, and a lot of us were looking for some budget friendly options, 

which we know today is no longer true. There are thousands of Airbnbs out there that rival even the hotel industry’s most luxurious properties.

And yes, guests are now scrutinizing over every single little detail. The Expectation Bar has been raised because there’s way more competition than there used to be. and I’ve got some interesting, really mind blowing stats here for you in just a second.

So the overall culture has changed with Airbnb and along with these higher expectations. We have much more competitive pricing because there are literally millions more Airbnbs than they used to be. Now, of course, every market’s different, every property’s different. But if you’re not using dynamic pricing tools today, like Wheelhouse or price labs, you’re going to get left behind.

Not using dynamic pricing tools today is really not optional. You have to have access to all the data and price your properties accordingly. Imagine Marriott going back to not having dynamic pricing. And I know I’m sort of giggling here, but you just can’t imagine that, right? Or American Airlines charging the same static pricing or adjusting it once every week or two weeks.

That’s just not a reality. So yes, guest expectations are much higher, and for us to compete in the industry, we need to be using a dynamic pricing tool.

 Now let’s take a second and think about reviews. 10 years ago, yes, reviews mattered, but they weren’t this algorithmic gatekeeper the way they are today. If you have a 4.7. Average, for example, you literally can drop off of the search results

In the early days, guests were thinking of their stay more along this sharing economy type of setup. Right. That has definitely changed.

And don’t get me wrong, things are much harder than they were today, but short term rentals are an incredible opportunity. If we compare them to other real estate options around well, you’d be hard pressed to find better returns, assuming you’ve got yourself a good property and assuming that you have great reviews in today’s market, not what would be considered great 10 years ago.

So I went through some of my history, some trips that I’ve taken over the years. I gotta say, it was kind of nice to go back and reflect on these trips as well. I’ve stayed in dozens, I don’t know, at least a hundred or a couple hundred. Airbnbs over the years 

and the properties I stayed at in the early days, yes, I was in a little bit of a different financial position, so they were a little bit more budget friendly, but I left them good reviews and going back and looking at these same properties and seeing their average review scores today, years later.

Well, it’s a little sad. They haven’t kept up with the industry. They haven’t kept up with expectations, and they’ve fallen a little bit behind.

Looking at that Atlanta property, for example, a 4.28 review score. This gentleman happens to have over a thousand reviews on his profile as well, so we know that he’s been doing it for a long time. But if you’re at 4.28, you might as well just start over. I mean, that’s really, really low. If we look at Airbnb, we know that their first page of search results only has something like 18 listings.

Imagine you’re in a market with a thousand listings and you’ve got a 4.28 review score. Guess where you’re going to show up very, very, very far down if you even show up at all.

Okay, let’s just look at some stats today. Yes, we know the cultures change. We know that you need dynamic pricing. We know that reviews are more important than ever. Let’s look at some stats now to see why all this has changed. The reality is that people always chase higher returns.

We’re seeing lots of Wall Street money come in, venture capitalists chasing the short-term rental industry because they’re chasing better returns. And yes, you can still get much better returns with a short term rental in most cases than you can with a lot of other types of real estate assets.

In 2025, Airbnb was valued at almost $90 billion.

And if we go way back 10 years ago or a little more in 2015, they were accommodating around 72 million nights. Per year. Now that sounds like a lot. That is an awful lot. But if we fast forward to today, their latest annual report is not out yet, but 2026. It’s estimated that around 550 million nights will be occupied.

Via an Airbnb reservation that is well over a 600% increase in the last 10 years. So that helps us explain why these guest expectations are higher and a lot of the reason why these things have changed.

But does it still make sense to be investing in short-term rentals in 2026? I absolutely a hundred percent would say yes, but like many things in life. It depends. So I get asked this question all the time. I just spoke with a gentleman yesterday that said, me and my wife are making around $750,000 per year, but we pay a lot of taxes.

And so they’re looking at the tax side. The tax benefits of a short-term rental. We’ve talked about bonus depreciation on this channel before. If you’re new to the show, you can go to st riches.com. You can find all of our prior episodes. We talk about everything from operations to taxes, so find us there.

You’ll also find a lot of free guidebooks and if you are enjoying the content and if you’re finding it helpful, I’d really appreciate a like or a follow on Spotify or Apple, wherever you happen to be tuning in.

So is it still worth it? Yes. And let’s just compare a short-term rental to a long-term rental. When I first got started in real estate over 16 years ago, it was long-term rentals. They made sense. Prices were lower, interest rates were lower, and your cash flow was higher. But a lot of that has disappeared.

I don’t want to say it’s not available because there’s lots of people doing a good job and finding really good opportunities. But in general, short-term rentals, if you choose your property right, have the opportunity to far exceed what you could do with a long-term rental. All right. I promised I’d give you one really important counterintuitive takeaway that’s changed from 10 years ago to where we’re at today, and that is that the hosts that are really excelling and doing well in earning great reviews. Are actually sending fewer messages today. So back in the past, yeah.

You had your, your host cell phone and you guys were chatting and he was following up all the time. Not that following up is not important, but what we want to accomplish today is to set the perfect expectations And answer all of our guest questions before they actually ask them.

So in the past, great hospitality really kind of equaled more communication, but that’s not what our guests are looking for today. And actually, if there’s more communication going on between you and your guests, it probably signals that there’s some sort of issue or something that has gone wrong. Now there are some caveats.

Yes, if you’re acting as a concierge. On behalf of your guests staying at your ultra luxury property, that’s a totally different story, but I’m talking about the majority of properties today. If you have more messages going out, it signals that you either didn’t set the right expectations or your guests were left with a lot of questions requiring them to reach out.

And when our guests are on vacation or taking some time off, they don’t want to have to be searching for answers.

So the Airbnb landscape has changed dramatically over the last 10 years. But tons of opportunity available. You just wanna make sure that you’re taking advantage of the latest technology, dynamic pricing, understanding what guests are looking for today, and where their expectations are at. I hope that gave you a little bit more insight, 

And if you have some awesome stories from staying in Airbnb’s over a decade ago and how that changed for you and your life, we’d love to know. Leave us some comments, shoot us an email. Until next time, I hope you have a fab this week. 

Well, welcome back to the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast. I’m really happy you’re here again. Uh, I have an excellent guest today, Natalie Palmer. She’s the co-founder of Level Up Your Listing Summit. It’s the largest annual women’s STR conference.

She’s also the host of the No Vacancy Podcast, which I’m sure a lot of you have been tuning into. Uh, it’s quickly landed in the top. 1% of podcasts worldwide. She works closely with Airbnb as an ambassador. She now helps investors find passive returns by connecting them with luxury hospitality projects.

Uh, and she lives in SoCal with her husband, and I know she just had her fourth kid, so I know she’s really busy. And we’re excited to have you on the show today. Welcome, Natalie. Thanks so much, Tim, for having me and yeah, it was great getting to connect with you just a few weeks ago. I had you on my podcast, so, um, if people wanna go hear Tim’s story, you can go check that one out, but happy to be on today.

Yeah. And that’s one of the fun things about being a podcaster, I guess we get, we have an excuse to talk to a lot of other people in the industry and really dig into the details and, and also meet a lot of cool people along the way. So I know you have a lot of awesome things, uh, that you’ve been doing and been doing for a long time.

But for those of, uh, for those of our audience that haven’t tuned into your podcast before, can, can you tell us a little bit more about you and, and your journey? Yeah, yeah, I’ll definitely give an intro. So I’ve been, uh, in the STR space for, uh, eight years now, and basically started with co-hosting before I even knew what co-hosting was.

Um, essentially I was, uh. Uh, outta college and like floating around, didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was taking on a bunch of side hustles. I was like doing branding on the side and social media. I was a wedding planner part-time. Like I had a million different gigs. Mm-hmm. And um, growing up we had a second home in Big Bear, California that we would just go and use.

Used as a ski place and when my sister and I got older, we just weren’t using it as a family anymore. And I had been hearing about Airbnb, so I was like, mom, dad, like, could I list this place on Airbnb and get a percentage for hosting it? So kind of like created the co-hosting model before I. Knew that that was actually a thing.

Um, but in one winter season they, they took some convincing, they were like very skeptical to let me take their precious home and turn it into a short-term rental. But once I got them on board, we made enough in one winter season. My parents were like, okay, we’re putting that towards a down payment on a second one, and you’re gonna manage that one for us as well.

Um, and then from there, I just had a ton of different, like neighbors and owners start approaching. Mm-hmm. And saying like, Hey, we see that your place is always booked. Like is there any chance that you could manage our. Short-term rental as well. Um, and so I just started co-hosting full-time. So that’s like kind of how my journey started.

After a few years of doing that, my husband and I started investing in real estate. Um, so that’s pretty much been my journey with, um, short-term rentals. But in the last year, I’ve. Was pregnant with my fourth and just got so busy with things that I’ve now moved over to helping with capital raising. Um, I’ve just had to take a step back from like renovating properties and managing them myself.

So it’s been really nice to still. Get, like get to be involved, but more like I’m remote now and I just like connect investors with really cool projects and I let the operators be the one who, ones who run everything. So my work is done once I get it funded, which has been a really nice change of pace for me.

Yeah, definitely. Oh, there’s a lot of pieces to it, as you know. Uh, and it can get exhausting, you know, the more, the more properties you add, the more things are are to do. It just gets multiplied. Um, so starting with that first property in Big Bear, um, how many properties did you, did you scale to before you decided?

Uh, to just start working with other investors. Um, yeah, so at one point we were managing 10 i I was managing 10 listings total in, in Big Bear. Um, so still those two first ones for my parents, um, and then eight others for other owners. Um, so it was a very like boutique business. I know. How many properties do you guys manage?

200 plus worldwide. Never got to that. Um, and all of the properties were all in the same, actually in the same exact condo complex in Big Bear. Um, and so it was a really, I I still manage today five total, including those two for my parents. Um, I’ve had some owners that have like sold or converted to long-term rentals and I have had no interest in building the co-hosting business back up.

Um, so today I managed five, but. Yeah, it’s been a really, this is like one tip I have for anyone listening who maybe wants to get into co-hosting. If you can find a, like condo complex or apartment building to scale in, I have one cleaner that works for all of them. We have the same handyman. Um, I, you know, like my, I’m running for the HOA board right now and my, my dad has been on the HOA board in the past.

It’s just so like easy to scale your operations. We almost do the boutique hotel model. But mixed with co-hosting. So it’s so easy to scale. My cleaner will like go start at one unit, start the laundry there and like hop around from spot to spot, unload dishes while another dishwasher’s running. Um, so yeah, that’s kind of how it’s been for 2017 is when I started doing all of that.

Um, and then really it’s in the last year that I still run that the co-hosting business, but it’s only five listings right now. Um, and I’ve really gone all in on capital raising. Awesome. Well, I want to talk to you more about the capital raising. Sure. But let’s dig in just a little bit more on, on the operations and, um, you know, your education and all of that because this industry’s changed so much.

I mean, it’s totally different than, than what it was a long time ago. I think it’s exciting because there’s lots of really good opportunities still, and so it definitely makes sense for a lot of I investors out there. If you find the right property. Um. And I totally hear what you’re saying. You know, having properties in the same space makes things a lot easier.

I, when I got started, I got started with smaller multifamily buildings, so it’s sort of the same idea, you know? Yeah. One housekeeper could clean five units. Um, can you tell us just a little bit about how you’re currently managing those five units, though? Maybe what software you’re using and, um, you mentioned your housekeeper.

Do you have anyone else helping you out with those units? Yeah, my mom is retired now actually, and so she’s jumped in and has been helping a lot. So she’s now the one that like drives to big bear and restocks things for us. Um, but I really try, honestly, you guys, your housekeeper is like your number one best asset for sure.

And I live a couple hours from the properties, so I will, a lot of times we’ll just like ship things to her. Like she tells us what we’re running low on and I’m like, okay, I’m sending. Toilet paper and paper towels and dish pods and whatever to you. And then she’ll bring them and restock on her next trip over to clean.

Um, so she’s been just the best asset and you know, like with damages and stuff, she’s the one taking pictures and telling us with repairs something’s broken. She reports to us what we need so we can hire, um, you know, whatever, a handyman or someone to come fix the appliance. Mm-hmm. Um, I like our housekeeper is the most.

Important part of the business, like it’s not even close. Um, my mom, like I said, she’s retired so she’s been helping with things too. And then VAs for messages have been really helpful. Um, I would say that that was easier to take advantage of when I had 10 listings. Like the cost of keeping a VA on was more justifiable.

Um, but now that we’ve dropped down to five, it’s harder. I do have a VA that. Has worked with me in the past. I don’t keep her on fulltime anymore. Um, but it’s like if I know we’re busy or like at nights she comes on and stuff. Um, but really it’s just me and my mom tag teaming messages throughout the day now, so it’s pretty manageable.

Okay. And then Tech stack. Yeah. You also asked me about softwares. Um, I really like hospitable and Price Labs of course. And, um. Then we just use like smart locks and ring cameras. So really nothing. Yeah. Crazy. I I don’t wanna overcomplicate it. So, yeah. Simple. Yeah, it’s easy to, uh. To want to use all the latest and greatest tools.

There’s just so many now, E every conference I go to, it’s like, I mean, there’s just a dozen new ones, you know? Yeah. But, um, okay. So some really good points there. The housekeeper one for sure. That that’s a huge advantage. Having someone on your team that really cares about your properties, and I think that’s one of the things I’ve found with my portfolio.

Love to hear from you, but. You know, if you, if we’re working with the same housekeepers, treating them really well, they take ownership of our properties, especially if we’re remote. Like you’re two hours away, they’re in your properties much more often than you are. Definitely. And so when something happens, like, you know, they take ownership, uh, in that.

That really helps in the operation. Um, I’m curious if, you know, things are way different today than they were when you got started. Do you have any other, uh, quick tips for any of our listeners out there? Things that maybe you’re doing differently now that, that you weren’t doing back in the past? Um. Oh, let’s see.

Well, one of my best tips, like back to the housekeeper topic is I, I really recommend that people find one housekeeper that just works with them and maybe they have like two or three helpers underneath them, but doing that as opposed to hiring like a cleaning company where they just send a new person every time.

’cause to your point, you want somebody that’s gonna like take ownership. Over it. I don’t want somebody who’s thinking, oh, I don’t have to dust the base boards because I’m not even gonna be the one here. Next time they’ll send another cleaner that’s on payroll that day. So that’s like one of my best tips is just to really find somebody like dedicated to your property.

Um, but let’s see. You asked me if there’s something I’m doing now that I didn’t at the beginning. Um. Such a good question. Let’s see, my, I, I would definitely say my pricing strategy has changed. I think in the past we would really, um. Try to raise prices as dates got closer and you know, do like kind of surge pricing and stuff.

As things got closer and right now I am more willing to like drop. I’ve noticed that people are booking things more last minute. Um, I think my whole philosophy on pricing has probably changed in the last, like two years. Um, I also used to do much like we’re in a very seasonal market and so I was more. I would only wanna open like three months at a time because it was like, okay, if we get a really good snow season, I know I can charge more for winter prices.

So I didn’t want winter dates open when it was still summer. I wanted to wait and play it out a little bit. But now I’ve noticed like it’s really beneficial actually to have the calendar more booked out farther in advance. I think the OTAs and like Airbnb’s algorithm kind of rewards you. See more bookings coming in.

So that’s probably the one I can think of that’s like really changed since the beginning. Just pricing looks so different from how I used to do it. It definitely does. I mean, when you got started, when I got started, there weren’t really pricing tools available. No. You know, no. My pricing strategy was using the other condos as comps.

Like I was like, okay, that one got booked really early for that price, so I’m gonna raise the prices on the other ones. Like that got snatched too quickly. Um, I would use like all the other nine as my own like comp set. Mm-hmm. And now it’s so much easier with, with things like price labs. Yeah. Yeah, totally.

Well, let’s see. So you have ventured into fundraising. Yeah. And helping investors acquire properties. That sounds really interesting. Can you tell us more about that? Yeah. This was actually something that I wish I had started sooner, but through my podcast and my network, I. Would get a lot of people reaching out and saying, you know, Hey, I’m a high income earner, and started listening to your podcast to try and get into short term rentals and use some tax loopholes.

And I’ve realized that I want nothing to do with this. It seems way more work than I thought, but if you ever have an opportunity for me to invest with you, like keep me posted. So I had kind of been growing a list like that over the last few years. Um, and then on the flip side, you know how it is when you’re talking to guests.

People have such cool projects they’re working on, and we’d turn off the microphone at the end, finish recording, and people would tell me like, oh yeah, I would love to do this, but we need 2 million in capital to make it happen. And so for the past few years, I’ve kind of had this idea of like, I think I need to be like a matchmaker in this space, but I don’t know why I didn’t jump into it.

And then, um, finally I started working with, um, two of my friends, Maddie and Skyler, and they’re growing a brand called For the Love of Upstate. Which is a luxury portfolio of gorgeous short-term rentals all in upstate New York. And they had somebody raising capital for them, but she had to leave. She pursued something else.

And so we got to talking and I was like, they wanted this, this void filled. And I was like, that’s something I’ve been wanting to get into, like let’s try working together. We just hit it off immediately. It’s been a great partnership. So I’ve been working with them since April, so coming up on a year. Um, but I, I love it.

Like, it’s just been, so, I think also coming from the podcast world, like I love talking to people and getting to know people in these one-on-one conversations. And that’s really what it’s been. It’s a lot of what do you want as an investor and like building deep relationships with people who are gonna send, you know, a hundred thousand dollars.

So. It’s just fit very well into what I’m doing. And like I said, the best part is Maddie and Skylar are the ones finding the properties and designing them and launching them and managing them. And I don’t have to do any of that part. Um, yeah, which is so funny ’cause I’ve talked to people who have said like, oh my gosh, like what Maddie does is my dream job.

Like, wouldn’t you rather be doing that? And I’m like, Nope, not right now. Maybe there’ll be a time in the future where I wanna get back to designing properties and being more hands on, but. Not right now. Lot. So there’s, there’s a roll out there for everyone. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Well it is really nice to, you know, to be a podcaster.

I mean, you have tons of good connections. How long have you had your podcast? How long have you been? Um, I started it like early, um, like Q1 of 2022. So four. Oh my gosh. Is that four years? Yeah, it is four years now. We’re in the future. Oh my God. I can’t believe how quick that’s been. I would’ve told you it was like, oh, pro, like two years.

Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, lots of good contacts. Yeah. That you’re in a really good position to, to connect people, you know? And that, and that’s the reality, you know, is that there’s a lot of people out there with a lot of money, but they don’t want to do the work. And maybe they don’t know people in the industry, people that they can trust.

Uh, and so being a connector and being in that position, that’s, that’s really awesome. Um, now you also run a conference, uh, that you’ve been doing. Tell us more about that, because I imagine that’s another place where, again, uh, you’ve been able to connect with a lot of, a lot of people in the. Yeah, definitely.

Um, yeah, like you mentioned in the, in the intro, I’m also the co-founder of Level Up Your Listing Summit. Um, we are the largest annual women’s short-term rental conference. We do welcome men too, but if you go on the website just. Be warned. Our branding is very, is very girly and we make no apologies for that.

Um, but we probably have about 15% male attendants every year. Um, but yeah, this is something I’ve started with my partner, uh, Tatiana Taylor Tate. She’s an award-winning interior designer, also does short-term rentals and co-hosting and property management. And she’s based in Vancouver. Um, but her and I met at a short-term rental conference.

And we loved it. That was the first time we met in person and I had never that, that event totally opened my eyes to like, how many people are in this world and interested in this topic. Mm-hmm. And like I mentioned earlier, I had a background in, um, event planning and I was a wedding planner before I ever found short term rentals, and I really missed events.

I didn’t wanna do a career in wedding planning ’cause I realized I would never have a Saturday to myself ever again. Mm-hmm. But I did miss doing events and then with Tatiana being a designer, I think we knew that we could come together and something that was frustrating us in the industry was a lot of people at conferences.

Short-term rental conferences would talk on stage about how important branding is and differentiating yourselves and how the space was changing and you had to be more competitive. But they were saying this on stage in like really stuffy hotel ballroom with no personality. And we were like, I think that we could make a conference where we.

Put our money where our mouth is and like really turn it into a whole guest experience. So that’s what we did. And if you wanna check out our website and like our gallery of old photos, uh, from previous years, we’re about to have our fourth summit and we really focus on brand activations, like guest experience.

It’s just so much fun to attend. Every single booth that we do has like a whole theme to it. And. I don’t know. We call ourselves like the Coachella of the short-term rental industry. Like it really feels like a festival when you go. Um, but our next one is coming up March 29th through 31st in Phoenix. So yeah, we’re just, uh, couple months away.

Super exciting. Awesome. Well, uh, I’m hoping that, uh, we’ll be able to attend and I know Yeah, we have to get you guys there. Yeah, we’d love to be there. And, and conferences really are, I just did an episode on, um, a recap on a, a conference that I just went to, and there really are such a good place. I mean, yes, there’s lots of good information on podcasts, but to, to be with someone for an afternoon or a lot of the people that we meet at these industry conferences are people that we end up.

Doing business with. Yeah. Just like you and becoming friends, you know, lifelong friends. So I think it’s a really good opportunity and um, that’s awesome. You guys have been doing that. Um, and fourth, fourth time around you guys know what you’re doing. Uh, so that’s good. I hope by now we do. Yeah, we’re learning every time.

Yeah. But, oh man. Events are, events are no joke, you guys. It’s like so expensive. Lot of work. So much work. I just can’t even believe like the numbers were. You know, sending a check to the AV team for like $30,000. And I’m like, oh God. Like it’s just such big numbers you’re working with, but yeah, that’s what it’s, and you have to, uh, yeah, you gotta.

Yeah, there’s all the things we calculate, you know? Um, but Okay. Well excited for that. Um, let’s maybe go back to your, to the acquisitions and stuff you guys are doing. Sure. You said, so you, you’ve been a connector in the space, you know, helping a lot of people. Um. Uh, with, with your partners, find the right properties, can you tell us a little bit more about maybe how they’re finding the properties or I’m not sure how, uh, detailed you get with them on that?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So right now, like I said, I’m working with, um, uh, specific portfolio. So it’s for the love of upstate and I think maybe eventually I’d love to help other. Projects also get funded. Like if somebody had some great vision for like AGL site or a, you know, tree House Village, like step into some of those.

But right now I have a really good partnership. So I’ve been working exclusively with, uh, for the love of upstate, but. Our model, like how they find properties is, this has been really interesting too. The upstate New York market, there’s really not a lot of data on, and so the first few projects that they were fundraising for, this is before I came on, it was.

There was no air DNA to like even prove that the model would work. Mm-hmm. It was really just Maddie and Skyler saying like, we’ve lived here for a while. We think we know what people want. And, uh, the, the housing prices are so good there, but they were basically calculating that they would make the same amount of revenue, like.

150 to 200,000 a year per short-term rental. That’s almost the same revenue you’re gonna get right now in like a Scottsdale or in Austin, or maybe a Nashville market. But in those three markets, your purchase price is gonna be 1.2 to 1.5 million. And we are finding houses in upstate New York for between 300 to 500,000 that are projected to do that same amount.

So that was kind of the first, um. Sort of how the idea of like building an upstate was born and then it’s just so close and driving distance to so much of the population. It’s so dense over there in the northeast. So we knew that we’d have, you know, a good influx of people to come visit. But yeah, there’s a lot of, upstate New York has a lot of like those, you know, old.

Uh, inherited, passed down homes like very grandma chic that just haven’t been updated in 40 or 50 years. And Air, DNA was saying you could maybe make 30,000 a year on these. So the numbers were not there to prove it, but we just did our ninth, ninth or 10th project. I forget. And. All of them are doing between 150 to 200,000 in revenue.

So now we’re able to prove our own comps with our own properties. Um, and air DNA still hasn’t quite caught up to what we’re doing. I don’t know if I want them to at this point. Like we feels like we found like, kind of like a hidden gem of a market. Um. So yeah, that’s, that’s what’s been really cool is like the purchase prices there are just so easy to make money on.

Um, but that’s been something that’s been really fun to navigate with investors. Like people will just say like, how we, we, I’ve heard a lot of people say like, oh, well, shouldn’t we invest in like a Scottsdale or something that like, has more comps and more mm-hmm. Proof behind it. And that we know that those numbers are more justified.

And it’s like, yes, you can, but again, you’re looking at these 1.2 to 1.5 million purchase prices, if not higher. And it’s so competitive. You have to do the entire backyard with the giant chess and the infinity pool and, you know, every, the, the golf simulator, like every amenity you can think of. So it’s nice to find these like hidden markets where.

Um, you can do the same revenue, but for a third, a third of the purchase price. Yeah. So, yeah, I feel like we tapped into something really special in this market and I think the key with markets like this where, you know, Scottsdale’s gonna have business because there’s so much to do there, so much food and nightlife and.

Golfing and events in town. Same with Nashville, same with Austin. When you’re doing a market like upstate New York, the property itself has to be a destination. And so we really focus on like wellness amenities and putting in cold plunges saunas, massage tables, hot tubs. Um, you really have to focus that like the property.

It’s is gonna be a place that people wanna go to just for the property itself. ’cause there might not be much to do around there. Yeah. Gosh, there’s, so, there’s so many good points there. Uh, first of all, congrats. Those are, those are amazing returns. Um, thank you. And yeah, some, some really good points there.

It’s taking that leap, you know, when there, yeah. When there is no data. But you mentioned something that really stands out for me is that your partner is familiar with the area and she was. Going after that model for something that she could see herself in. Yeah. Um, that’s, I think it helps when you are your own guest avatar.

Like you can picture like ly I would book this and I would come with friends who want like a wellness weekend if you can find something where other people don’t have to get it. But if you know that you would book it, I think that that speaks volumes. Yeah, absolutely. Um. And assuming the regulations are open there, you know?

Yeah. Whereas New York and a lot of those places are locked down, which also provides more demand, I would think, for surrounding areas. Um, that’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of that. ’cause a lot of our investors here in New York and immediately get scared and I’m like, no, no, no, that’s New York City.

Like we we’re not dealing with any of that in upstate. Um, but you’re probably right Tim, that it’s, uh. It squeezes people to have to drive a little bit further to go enjoy stuff like this. But Upstate has been really, really friendly with, with regulation. I mean, the only thing would be like, you know, if we started like throwing parties or something, right?

Even that a few of our properties, we can host weddings and the county had no issue with it. But you know, we might have to just like submit a request ahead of time. But yeah, upstate is very, very friendly with short term rentals, we’ve ran into no issues there. Yeah, well you, you mentioned some other, some other key things there too, is that the, the property is the destination.

This was something I heard as well at the recent conference that I was at, and it’s something that we’ve been seeing a lot. Uh, and I think one of the exciting things about it is that I. If your property is a destination and you, you, you can really push the upper, upper limits of price, you know? Yeah. It’s its own unique destination.

There’s not a lot of comps like, you know, Scottsdale where everything’s kind of the same, even if they all have pickleball courts, you know, if there’s a. 500 properties that are identical with pickleball courts. Um, so can you tell me and your partner’s a designer too? So you mentioned some, some cool things like cold plunges and stuff like that.

Are there some other sort of design tips or tricks that you might be able to share with us? Yeah, this is my best, and I’m not the designer, so I’m repeating from, from my partners, but this is the best tip that I heard when adding amenities. To your properties if you’re gonna follow this model of make the property the destination is.

I’ve seen a lot of people who just have a checklist and they’re like, okay, hot tub check, sauna check, uh, cold plunge check. But if you’re gonna go that route, the best advice I’ve heard from designers is to make sure the amenities you’re picking are not just checking a box, but they. Feed into the whole experience so you can find those, you know, portable saunas that just pop up in like a black vinyl tent and there’s some hose attachment that creates steam in there and one person can sit there.

Okay. Yeah, you can technically check off the box on your Airbnb listing that yes, you do have a sauna. But is that picture going to like inspire the guest experience that you want? So in our case, we either build saunas from scratch, like have them, you know, cedar planked and everything and bring in all of the, um, I don’t even know, the tech or the appliances to like make it work and heat up.

Mm-hmm. We’ll try to position it so it has like a waterfront view and we hold, put like a whole window there. Get, like the barrel saunas are really cool and make sure you have at least like a two or four seater so people can be in there together. Um, same thing with like, we’ll do like red light therapy rooms and you just wanna make sure like, you know, the ceiling is paneled and it’s got clean, crisp, white towels in there and like.

Fragrance mist, like you really wanna make it something and not just check off the box of like, oh yeah, we bought a red light therapy mask so we can claim that we had it. So I would say that’s like the biggest tip I’ve taken from designers is really do every, um, amenity with intention and not just checking off the box that you got it.

Yeah, that’s a good point. You know, if someone marks a king size bed on their listing and the first time you down, it’s a mattress on the floor, the legs break off. Like there you go. That’s not a very good experience. I guess technically you had the king size bed, but is that what somebody was really envisioning?

Probably not. Right. So, awesome. Okay, so you guys are building out, uh, like an individual portfolio at the moment? Yeah. All under the same brand. Um. Everyone in the space has been talking about branding you, you know, and you guys put a lot of thought into your, uh, conference, uh, it sounds like, into branding.

Yeah. Um, these destination type properties are really good candidates for repeat guests, I would imagine, you know? Mm-hmm. They love it. Uh, maybe they live in New York and they’re like, sweet, we can drive a couple hours. We’ll be back here. Can you tell us a little bit more of maybe what you guys are doing to try to get some of those guests back or build out your branding?

For these properties? Yeah, social media has been huge for that. And if we have somebody reach out about one property that happens to be booked, what’s so nice is if they’ve fallen in love with the brand and not just one particular property, we can always say like, I’m so sorry, but the Pearson House is booked.

But we do have the Upstate River retreat available for the same dates and it’s, you know, decorated like this. And usually if somebody’s reaching out over social media or direct booking, they’ve, they’ve already. Followed and like engaged with you and again, fall. Mm-hmm. Fallen in love with the brands. Like they’re not even picky about which property they go to unless one is smaller and it can’t like fit the people they need.

But outside of that, they just wanna experience like the brand. I mean, it would be the same as, you know, think of these like hotels, collections, the W or St. Regis, like these Lux hotel brands. Do you really care if you’re staying at the W in Paris or the W in London? Like maybe not if you just wanna go and like experience that, that brand for itself.

So that’s something that we’ve really tapped into is, um, I. Not necessarily repeat guests, but just getting people to be happy with like whichever property they get and wherever they stay. Um, but then of course for repeats, we do have, you know, um, like postcards and stuff in the properties. Like, stay with us again.

Scan this QR code. Mm-hmm. We follow up with messages, you know, book direct with us next time. Um, if they do a direct booking, it’s so much easier to just like recapture that they’re already on our email list and, and things like that. Um. Yeah, that’s, I’ve seen a lot of investors too who wanna have like something in like all different locations, let’s go open something in the Smokies and go open something in Montana, and you get pretty spread out.

It’s kind of nice to have everything in one area where people can like, choose from just different properties in the same, in the same concentrated area. Yeah, that’s a good point. It also helps out with what you were talking about earlier, you know, just with operations, I mean, if you’ve got all your properties in the same areas can work with fewer, fewer team members on the ground.

Um, these do sound like larger, more luxury properties. So can you tell me a little bit about your guys’ operations and how you’re handling that part? Yeah, so operations, we do this total spread across all the nine or 10 properties. Right now it’s probably. Up to three and a half hours, like between all of them to drive.

Mm-hmm. So it’s not as close as like my condos that I was, that I was managing. Yeah. Um, so we do have to have different, like housekeeping teams and stuff. Um, but at least from a launching perspective, we have the same contractors and they’re willing to drive. A few hours so we can book them out and have a contractor team working for us exclusively right now.

Like we keep them busy with enough projects. Um, so that’s really nice. You just get consistency in work and if we have leftover, like trim and materials from one project, it just gets driven to the next one. So that’s been helpful. Um, but yeah, housekeeping teams and, uh. You know, random, like, uh, landscaping or like pool cleaners, like things like that.

We do have to localize a little bit more. I don’t know if our landscaper would drive two hours between properties. Right. Um, but also on the remote front, like your tech stack stays the same. Your pricing strategy, um, VAs handling messages, like all of that. We can also, um, standardize with just a few key players.

Right. Okay. Well, I’m curious how much you guys are actually investing back in these properties. ’cause you mentioned like the old granny. Yeah. Uh, you know, photos that, and it sounds like you’re doing a lot. You mind sharing, you know, how much you guys are actually putting into and how long it takes. Yeah.

Yeah. So, uh, really happy to say that our launch process has gotten shorter. Um, we always tell investors it’s about six months to renovate, but our last couple projects have come in at four months, so we’re getting faster and more efficient with this. Um, but yeah, we always tell investors plan for six, just in case.

Um, and, uh, what was the other part of your question? How much we’re putting into it? Yeah. You know, it obviously depends on each property. Some need more work than others. Um, but one thing we really focus on is right now there’s a lot of talk in the STR space on. Things like, you know, don’t even bother renovating the bathrooms.

Like you’ll hear that a lot. People will say that like, bathrooms don’t make money. Nobody’s booking an Airbnb because of the bathroom. They just wanna see like the common areas or the backyard or the amenities where they’re gonna hang out. Maybe the kitchen. That’s kind of the area where people focus and they’ll tell you like, don’t spend time on bathrooms.

Don’t spend time on the laundry room. Like nobody cares about those areas. We have really taken the approach, like our bathrooms are. So high end and so luxurious, like bidets and heated floors and like we really invest into the bathrooms nicely. Um, we also do a lot of like if the property needs a new roof or something, like we will not skimp on that, even if that’s not technically the thing that people are booking for.

But part of working with investors is. Especially if you have equity, and these aren’t just like private money lenders, but if they’re partners and they have equity, they’ll get profit on the sale. And those are the things that improve your resale value and help the property appreciate. A pickleball court or a giant chess set might be.

Popular for a short term rental, but that’s not gonna help a future buyer, um, see more value in the home. So we do focus a lot on like fixtures and higher end tile and yeah, luxury finishes. Um. Resurfacing herd wood floors, like repairing, like wood trim. Like if we can preserve any character, that’s definitely something we try to do.

Um, focusing on like wraparound porches, like all those like very unique things that we’ll just add to the appreciation and then that helps us refinance and we can pay out investors sooner. So we really like to focus on like the actual. Appreciation and resale value of the home in addition to the amenities.

Um, but a lot of STR designers, like I said, they’ll, they really like skimp on some areas and will just throw in like a fun wallpaper and a neon sign and, um, more colorful throw pillows. And that hasn’t really been our approach. Like we wanna actually make the homes better than when we bought them. Yeah.

Okay. Um, okay, so you guys are going back and pulling out equity then afterwards. Yeah. Uh, and it’s interesting. You really are building your own comps and so if someone’s giving you a loan as a short-term rental and they’re pulling up your, your comps, yeah, you’re creating your own value in the properties, which just is amazing.

That sounds amazing. Yeah. Um. Definitely. Uh, and you do put in a lot of work. I think the other benefit to putting in all the work up front is that you have less maintenance issues. You know, and you know, the, that’s al Barss are breaking off the wall or the roof leaks. That’s never point a good guest experience.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s like hard to view it that way ’cause you put so much more work in at the beginning. But I think you’re right. Like once it’s launched, we’re not. I mean, obviously things break. I don’t wanna say it’s like, you know, we never have to lift a finger again. Like of course you do. There is wear and tear involved with this.

But that’s a really good point. Like we, we try to concentrate more of the work in those like four to six months and then hopefully after that things are a little more well maintained. And I think too, that the type of guest we have booking does treat the property better. Like when they can see that the hosts and owners put that much effort into it, I think that you just do attract better guests.

I agree. I agree. Well, very cool, Natalie. Um, so it’s been quite the journey from your, your portfolio, uh, now helping others, uh, invest in some beautiful sounding properties running the conference. What, what do you see happening over the next few years? I think what I predict is gonna happen in this industry in the next few years is like.

Squeezing of the, I think like the middle class of short term rentals is gonna get pushed out. I really think that we’re gonna see basically. Like top, top, top tier properties, like just the 1% of like beautiful destination luxury properties. And then I think that there’s still gonna be budget friendly options, but it’s like that whole middle portion of listing that can’t decide.

Like they’re not gonna drop their rates to be a budget friendly option. ’cause they did spend a little more on it. They’re not making enough to reinvest and bring it to that next tier. I think those are gonna get squeezed out or maybe have to switch to like midterm rentals or long-term rentals. Mm-hmm.

Like that segment has just gotten so competitive. So that’s kind of what I see. Like either just double down on being like a budget friendly place and don’t even worry about like reinvesting and sucks to say, but like, just own what you have that it is like a worse experience, but it’s, hmm. An economy choice, or you need to really go all in on making the property the destination.

Yeah, there’s a lot of truth to that. We see that, uh, in the numbers, you know, and in all the markets that we’re in. And with Air DNA, I think the exciting thing though still for me, always in this industry is that, uh, if you’re doing a really good job operating, even if you’re a budget or middle class Yeah.

Or luxury, like you still have to do a good job operating. And if you do, then you can earn a lot more than your competition. That’s so true. You know, we talked a lot in this conversation about like amenities and, and, and luxury and making the property nice, but something that just goes so far is respond to messages promptly, like communication and be clear when you communicate and cleanliness.

Like those are things that no matter what your home looks like right now, or what amenities you have or what you’re pricing it at, you can. Have better communication and better cleanliness standards and guests do notice that stuff like that is something immediately within your control. Definitely, definitely.

Well, Natalie, uh, it’s been great learning more about your story and everything you’ve got going on. Can you share with the audience again, just, uh, where they can find you and your, your upcoming conference? Yeah, for sure. So, again, I’m Natalie Palmer, and thanks so much, Tim for having me. Um, and um, we’ve got Level Up Your Listing Summit coming up our fourth year, March 29th through 31st in Phoenix.

You can just go to level up your listing summit.com to find tickets to that, or if you’re interested in sponsoring or have any other ideas, connect with us there. And then I’m also the host of No Vacancy, the podcast. Um, you can find that anywhere where you get your podcasts. Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on.

I look forward to staying connected. Thank you.

Over the last 10 plus years, I’ve attended well over two dozen industry conferences and spent well over a hundred thousand dollars. At least on these conferences, they really add up. But you know, how many of those conferences were actually worth it? Not all of the ones I attended. But the recent IMN conference that I just got back to delivered, this is my second time attending, and this one packs a punch.

So I’ll be breaking down my top six takeaways for you to help you along your short-term rental journey. Everything from operations to design trends. Stay tuned.

Well, welcome back to the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast. I’m happy you’re here again. I can’t believe. How fast time is going. I’ve been traveling around a lot and so I know that speeds things up. But we left Brazil and we went to California to visit some of my family. We were there through the new year.

Then we went on a little cruise in the Caribbean, and then we went to Orlando, Florida where I am in contract for a new property. And I know you might be thinking Orlando, Florida, isn’t that the most competitive short-term rental? Space in basically the whole us and yeah, it definitely is one. 

So it’s actually gonna be a really good test for me and our team to manage a property in a market that has thousands of very similar properties. But the property that I’m in contract for, it’s actually a little different. It’s got some unique things to it. I think it’s gonna stand out. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes.

And of course, I will share all of that with all of you to give you my best insights.

So I left the IMN conference last night and just arrived back here in Meine Columbia. As a lot of you know, I’ve been spending a lot of time here over the last 10 years. We’ve been building a resort hotel, and I’m excited that we’re probably gonna be launching the first five units in just, uh, maybe in the next month.

So, without further ado, what makes the, IM in conference stand out and I’ve been to dozens of these. I spent a lot of money attending short-term rental conferences. The thing that stands out for the Im in is that. The attendees are actual operators. There’s lots of people there that have portfolios and sizable portfolios.

I would say the majority of the people there probably are operating over 20 properties, and many of them operating hundreds of properties. Like my team and I at Cosley, we’re now managing a little over 225. We’re in a whole bunch of cities. If you need some help with your portfolio. Head over to sdr riches.com.

You’ll see a little partner with us button there. I’d be happy to jump on the phone with you, see if your property makes for a good fit.

So what makes this conference different? Well, aside from the fact that tons of the attendees are real serious operators and are doing everything they can to really perfect their operation, and I happen to know a lot of them personally because I’ve been going to a lot of these conferences, so I get a lot of benefit just from these side conversations outside of the big sessions.

But the thing that’s amazing about the way they’ve. Crafted this conference is that all of the sessions are held on a panel and they have chosen operators that are best fit for each of these topics. So everything from AI and technology to design to market trends. You name it, there’s a panel for it.

And the other thing that I like about this conference is it’s actually really quick. It’s only a day and a half or so, and so they really pack it full. Unlike some of the other conferences, VRMA, for example, I have gotten a lot of benefit. Again, I get a lot of benefit from the attendees. Going there. That is the industry’s largest conference.

But a lot of those sessions, to be honest, they’re just kind of repeat stuff that they’ve been doing year after year.

So I like the IMN because I think it’s fresh. It’s real world data, and it’s actually pretty small, so there’s like maybe 300 people that attend. So it’s a little bit more intimate, and you get a lot more of those little side conversations going on.

so let’s jump into some trends. What’s actually happening in the short term rental world in 2026? Well, there’s a lot of things happening behind the scenes that I guarantee you do not know about. Or the average listener to this podcast that does have a smaller portfolio.

There are venture capital funds out there acquiring tons, thousands of units of individual property management companies.

Now this new wave of venture capital is doing it behind the scenes, whereas before we had companies like Vac Casa, as you may be aware. They went out of business. They were the nation’s largest property manager. They got bought by Cago, which their CEO was there, and I’ve got some great notes that he shared during the conference.

I will share those in just a second. But there’s this big trend where people are just chasing higher returns, and so these venture capital companies are coming in. They’re identifying smaller property management companies, usually around the a hundred to 200 unit size. They’re purchasing them because they’ve got a proven model.

They’ve been doing a good job, and those returns that they’re getting are better than they can get in other places. Now you would think that they’re going in and just centralizing all the operations, uh, adding a whole bunch of technology behind the scenes, and I’m sure that there are some doing that.

But the gist of what I got speaking to some of these actual acquisition companies is that they’re kind of just keeping things how they are.

So we know that investors are always going to chase the highest returns, and over the last few years, it’s just not really possible to get cash flow from long-term rentals. And people recognize that. And they’re coming in and they’re coming in quickly.

So a lot of acquisition happening. Cago who purchased Vac Casa actually flipped the whole business, thousands, tens of thousands of units. And what they did is they realized that these large national managers were not doing a good job. On the ground with their local teams. Reviews suffered and they started churning, started losing lots and lots of properties.

We’ve talked about that a lot on this channel before, how you have to have the local operations in place, but you also need. Centralized operations in the back to really make that possible. If you’re new to the channel, we can go to st riches.com, check out all of our prior episodes. Our team and I have managed well over 60,000 guests in a whole bunch of different places, so we’ve got some eBooks put together with some real world advice to help you along your journey.

So Cago flipped Vac Casa basically in a year where they were taking all of these markets that had existing management in place and selling it off to other operators that they think could do a good job as a franchise model. So Vac Casa went from acquiring a whole bunch of companies. And realizing that that wasn’t a good model.

Things fell apart. They got bad reviews. They got purchased by Cago, who then broke up that huge conglomerate into a franchise model. Again, separating out all of those properties into individual markets where they know that they had good operators on the ground.

Along those lines of chasing higher returns, we are seeing a lot of people go into the luxury and ultra luxury market. The commodity type properties have really. Seen a lot of competition and their prices and their ADRs have suffered, although most people at the conference agree that they don’t really see a big drop in ADRs coming across the board because supply is not increasing like it was after COVID 2122.

So people are finding that the luxury market and creating those truly unique experiences, again, just differentiating your property is where the highest returns are coming. And there were also people here at the conference, venture capitalists, chasing these types of properties and building them theirselves.

So I would say we will see a little bit more supply coming down in the luxury segment,

 because of barriers of entry to these really luxury type properties, uh, you know, given the, the amount of money they cost, uh, the location, the time to build them or build them out, I don’t see this supply segment growing extremely quickly.

But you do want to keep an eye on it, and you can keep an eye on it by using tools like Air DNA you wanna filter out for properties that sleep maybe over 20, maybe over 30 people.

 All right. Let’s talk a little bit about operations, because of course you can have the most beautiful properties in the world, but if you’re not doing a good job at operating them, you get bad reviews and then your guests will not book your property because you’re not going to show up on the platforms.

And so, uh, there was a really interesting segment on service and what actually makes for that good guest experience. Uh, and this was a stat that came from Disney, but if we break the experience of a guest down to people, the places. And the process. Three areas where a potential experience could go wrong.

What do you think is the most important piece of that? It could be places, people, or processes. Well, 80% of that according to Disney depends on your processes. That means you could have the best team, you could have the property in the best place, but if you don’t have those processes in place. Well, then things fall apart.

You don’t know how to handle guest situations when they come up, and that will lead to bad reviews.

Now, one other thing to add to this that’s really interesting, you can actually create a better experience for your guests if something goes wrong. And now I know that sounds totally crazy, but things do go wrong, right? And so when something goes wrong. People’s expectations go down. And this is your opportunity to really jump in there and serve them and show that you care.

And that’s the biggest reason for someone to leave a bad review is not the the people or the place. Yes, it’s the processes, but inherent in that process is showing whether you care or not. And so if someone thinks that they’re just a number on the scoreboard. And you don’t care about them at all, that’s when they’re gonna leave you a bad review.

And so this is something that’s been a little challenging for those of you out there that are renting very short lengths of stay. If you have someone stay with you for one night, for example, you don’t get a lot of opportunity to to, to show them that you care.

There was actually a funny example they gave of a pet services company that provided, you know, pet supplies and things like that that would intentionally mess up their for first order with their customers so that they could make up for it and win that customer over for life. And they had data to show that their lifetime value of those customers was higher when they messed something up and fixed it.

Now, of course, I’m not recommending that you mess anything up with your guest experience, right? And that’s probably not even now, of course, I’m not recommending that you mess anything up with your guest experience. Uh, but just remember that, uh, when things go wrong, it’s your opportunity to show that you actually care.

But coming back to the main reason for a bad guest experience, you have to have those processes in place.

There was a lot of talk at this conference about scaling, and again, that comes back to processes You cannot scale if you do not have things in place, if you do not have standard operating procedures.

And as your team’s growing, as you’re adding more properties to portfolio, there’s way more to handle, right? And that’s again why we’ve developed Cores Lease. So we can be that core operating center on the back end of your short term rentals.

Because we know it takes a lot of time and experience to set up a lot of these processes, but one thing that you can do right now is if you’re managing your properties yourself, if look at your communication, whether you’re communicating with your vendors, your housekeeper, uh, your maintenance people, are you doing it on standard old?

SMS text message. Are you using WhatsApp? Are you using a system like Slack? Well, a lot of times we’re over communicating if we have group messages set up, especially, a lot of times we’re sending messages to people that don’t really need to see them, and that’s sort of just bogs everything down. So that’s something you can do right now if you’ve got a lot of communication going on.

The more properties you have, the more communication you’re gonna have. Just do a quick revamp of that. Make sure that there aren’t people in groups or shared message threads or email copies, all those types of things that don’t actually need to be there. ’cause that just bogs everything down makes it more difficult for you to offer that great guest experie.

Another interesting KPI that you might consider monitoring, especially for those of you that are growing your portfolios, is your messages per guest. Now, I know that sounds a little weird, but if we think about it. We want to answer all of our guest questions before they actually show up to the property or before they ask us something.

We want to anticipate all of those questions. And so if our average message per guest is very high, like maybe it’s 20 or 30 or something like that, that means there’s way more communication going on. That’s, that means there’s way more things that they didn’t know, uh, or things that we didn’t answer upfront.

So the lower that number is, the better you’re likely doing with your guests and the better your operation.

All right, let’s jump into technology. So of course there were a lot of vendors there sponsoring the event, and a lot of them are talking about ai. And there’s so many ways to use this in our short-term rental business, but probably the most common one that people are approaching first is automated messages for our guests.

The guest communication piece of it, although there were financial companies there helping with, uh, automating your finances with ai. So you name it, if you are a technology provider in the short-term rental space and you’re not using ai, well, you are getting left behind very, very quickly. Uh, and you’re gonna go out of business. That’s just, that’s just the plain, simple truth.

One of the new AI programs out there that’s creating quite a bit of buzz is called Boom, and this is based off an AI platform in the back. But you know, I mentioned going to these conferences year in and year out, meeting a lot of people.

It’s really interesting to talk to people actually using these products. The reality is that there is no single product out there that’s going to handle your whole short-term rental operation. It does take a team combined with the best technology. And what’s happening is because technology’s so much easier to create today than it ever has been.

Everyone’s trying to do everything. Uh, and we know after managing so many guests and so many properties in a lot of different markets, that not every technology piece of technology is as good as the other one. Dynamic pricing tools, for example. Price Labs and Wheelhouse. They have been hard at work for over a decade, whereas we have property management software platforms like Guest and Hostway now offering these dynamic pricing tools.

But they’re way behind. They’re not focused on this. They’re basically offering, trying to offer everything so that customers use everything through them, right? But we know that they’re not doing as good a job as the people that are s. Specifically focused on that one item, but we know that they got a lot of catching up to do and they’re probably never going to catch up.

So the ideal scenario is that you choose the best piece of technology for whatever component of your short-term rental operation that happens to be, whether it’s guest communication, whether it’s integrating your locks and your smart home technology, whether it’s. Your dynamic pricing or your task management, there is no centralized program that’s knocking all of these outta the park.

But the first place to start for most of you is guest communication. Uh, and we know that there’s a lot of things that AI can do that we as humans just can’t do. We can’t remember everything. Uh, we can’t create a tone to match each of our guest profiles. Uh, we’re gonna write the same way, right? And if we have other people helping us, well, they’re gonna write very likely the way that they write.

And so that creates a bit of mismatch communication. Uh, and the reality is, is that we have to think about all these things. We have to remember all these details. And AI can, it can do a better job.

 So always a good idea to keep an eye on technology. But remember, there is no one product out there that can do everything you need it to do for your short-term rental operation. And there’s also a lot of overlap. So if you don’t have the volume of reservations coming in to actually test out this software, well then I hope podcasts like, like this one and other ones out there are providing you some good feedback. But the true, true source of real information is to talk to other operators that are actually using these tools.

Okay. Let’s get over to some design tips, because we know how important this is for our short-term rentals. We have to stand out. Things are more competitive than they’ve ever been before. Right?

A good tip that I picked up this last week was you really want to dedicate the majority of your furniture. To your top five to seven photos. Remember, most people when they’re browsing Airbnb or the OTAs like VRBO, they’re not looking past like five photos. In fact, a recent study showed that 80% of people browsing Airbnb don’t make it past the first five photos.

So that means you want to put your furniture budget. Into those header photos. Maybe it’s your outdoor amenities. Maybe you have a mural wall inside the property, something different that’s gonna get you to stand out compared to all the other properties that are similar to yours.

another quick tip. Choose comfort over design. So yes, you need those design elements so someone will book your property, but once they check in, if they’re sitting in your chairs and they’re squeaking and falling apart. Well, that’s not going to create a good experience. So linens, you don’t want to skimp on linens.

 We actually did a full episode on that, and it’s one of our most popular episodes on YouTube. It’s way back, episode 1 67. So go back and check that out. You don’t have to spend an arm and a leg for your linens, but you do wanna make sure that they’re comfortable and they’re durable. And of course you wanna make sure that they’re all white, right?

That’s what hotels do. It’s easier to wash. You can bleach them, and your guests know that they’re clean.

One area in design that you don’t wanna spend a whole lot of money on is artwork. So you can get some great murals and things like that online now, or wallpaper, for example, that doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. You don’t want to be out there spending thousands of dollars on artwork and things like that, that most people, the majority of guests aren’t going to appreciate.

One place you may consider adding a unique touch is what they were calling at the conference. The fifth wall, that would be the ceiling. So most people don’t look at the ceiling, but there are a lot of ceiling treatments that we can add to really make a space pop. And remember, make a space pop for those header photos.

A couple other quick tips I picked up from another friend over dinner is using perplexity. This gets into the ai, but there’s, there’s just so many cool things about it. First of all, it uses multiple AI programs at the same time, so chat, GPT. Claude and Jim and I imagine doing one search. And it goes to all three of those.

And then they have their own browser called Comet, which will allow you to search for things online and it can do the searching for you. Let’s say you wanted to order something from Amazon, for example. You could have Comet do this for you, log into your actual Amazon account and add things to your cart.

So those are just a few of the latest tips and tricks that I picked up at this latest conference, and I’ll of course be going to a lot more so that you do not have to and reporting back to you if you haven’t yet. If you’re finding value in our content, I’d really appreciate if you wouldn’t mind leaving us, uh, like or subscribing on YouTube, or if you’re listening on the audio version, following us on Spotify or on Apple iTunes.

Until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week. 

Welcome back to the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast. Normally on this show, we talk about things that you should be doing to help your short-term rental, to build your property management portfolio, to create better guest experiences, all these things that you should be doing.

But I have the luxury of talking to property managers like you and owners, investors almost every day across the nation. And there’s a lot of things that you should not be doing, and so today I wanna break down eight things that I find a lot of you are doing, which isn’t just holding you back, but it’s also leading a lot of times to a worse guest experience.

So let’s go ahead and jump into it. The first thing that I find a lot of growing property managers, anywhere from a couple units to several dozen are not doing is that they’re not properly screening their guests. If you are taking reservations on booking.com or direct bookings, well then you’ve gotta be careful.

You want to make sure that you’re matching the IDs. To the credit card payments, you wanna make sure that you have really good house rules in place.

If you missed one of our recent episodes on House Rules, it’s episode three 15. You can go back and check that out. We break down in detail all of our recommended house rules, but we’ll also leave a link in the show notes here so you can just download our copy and adjust it however you need to.

So doing some proper screening before your guest checking your property. It’s going to save you in the long run, and I know a lot of you might be thinking, well, I have really great properties and I get really great guests all the time, but believe me, after managing O over 60,000 guests with my team.

One day some guest is gonna check on your property that you could have identified beforehand, and they’re going to cause a lot of headaches. They might even cause some damage and maybe even worse than that, they might create a terrible time for you as a host or an owner.

And then leave you a really bad review. And we know how difficult bad reviews have gotten to get removed from the platforms. And some platforms, it’s not even possible. So by being diligent upfront, you can save yourself a lot of headache, but also protect your properties more.

The second thing that you need to stop doing is stop prioritizing one channel. Over the others. A lot of you are only on Airbnb or you’re only on VRBO.

And while your calendar may be staying full, it’s maybe not optimized in terms of your average daily rates. We know for a fact that the more visibility a property has, the more opportunity for someone to book your property. In other words, the more demand for your property and the higher you should be able to charge for that property.

There’s also a bit of risk when it comes to prioritizing one channel over the other. Most commonly, that’s Airbnb for most of you, and it’s Airbnb for most of you, because that’s the easiest channel to go on. But you gotta think if that’s the easiest channel to go on, at least in the United States, then there’s probably more people on it, unlike channels like booking.com, which yes, it takes a little more work to get set up.

And yes, there’s some other policies and things that you really need to be aware of. But it’s a whole bunch more opportunity to get your property booked at higher rates. So just because a channel is easier to go on doesn’t mean that it’s better. And lastly, I’ll just say this allows you to keep your portfolio diversified. If you go way back to one of the episodes I did a long time ago, I actually had one of my Airbnb accounts.

Taken down. This was for a discrimination issue. We had a housekeeper that denied a pet, which happened to be a service animal, and Airbnb just disconnected our calendar. Now, we’ve since resolved that. That’s a long time ago, and we’re fully aware of that, But we see all the time listings getting taken down. Maybe it’s just temporarily, and a lot of times it’s not necessarily for a valid reason. So if your property gets taken down and you’re only on one channel, you could have a big hole in your calendar.

Okay. The third thing that you should stop doing is stop buying cheap furniture where you need quality furniture. Where do you need quality furniture? Well, you definitely need a quality bed frame because there’s gonna be a lot of people staying on there. They might be doing some things that, uh, shake the bed up a little bit, you could say.

And if you’re working with a cheap bed frame, it’s gonna loosen up, it’s going to start to squeak, it’s going to rock back and forth, and your guests are not going to like that.

So make sure that you’re not skimping out and buying cheap furniture where it really matters. This also includes your sofa, and you want a sofa that you can clean easily where you don’t need to be spending an arm and a leg might be on items like art, for example. Someone’s not going to appreciate that Picasso art piece or the replica or whatever it happens to be, maybe as much as you will.

And if you’re spining, an arm and a leg on it. You’re not really getting more bookings from that.

Now, that’s not to say you shouldn’t have a great design in your property that really helps it stand out, but this point number three, has to do with furniture. And if you’re setting higher expectations online with great photos and someone shows up to your property and what seemed like a luxurious property, just feels sort of shaky and not well put together.

Well, it’s gonna show up in your reviews.

The fourth thing that you want to stop doing, especially as a growing property manager, is just signing up for all the latest and greatest technology tools. Now I know I’m a bit guilty with this one. If you’ve tuned into the show for quite a while. Well, you know, I’ve tried out a lot of tools.

But we have a lot of properties to try out our tools with and I also know a lot of people in the industry that are personally using these tools. And so we get the insights, we get the things that maybe aren’t so great with some of these tools upfront, and that really helps us make the best decisions when it comes to using the right tools.

So I’d highly recommend if you, if you don’t know a lot of people in the industry, jump on some forums. Go to our website, st riches.com. You can check out all of our past episodes. We also have a whole bunch of guidebooks around these topics, so just make sure you do your due diligence. Before you sign up for a tool that’s helping run a big part of your business, but maybe isn’t helping it run in the most optimal way

You wanna be careful with all the new AI tools coming on board. There are lots of them out there. Believe me, there’s gonna be a lot more coming because people can basically create them. Literally in like a couple days now. So you want to do your due diligence, make sure you’re not expecting some, some AI tool out there to do it all.

You’ve gotta make sure it’s tested first before you pull the trigger. 

All right, number five, and I know that this one is going to get a lot of pushback, so if you disagree with what I’m about to say, please share your opinion down in the comments. I’d love to hear why you think I’m wrong. Here it goes,

Number five, when it comes to revenue management, do not create a revenue management goal. I know most revenue managers out there are still doing this. I just got back from a conference and the panel on revenue management. They all say set a goal, but what does the goal actually have to do with reality with the market?

You know, markets change all of the time and the market. Should be telling us how much our property can earn if you’re setting a goal based on last year’s numbers. Well, we’re not in last year anymore. We’re here today in 2026. If you’re listening to this podcast at the time of this recording and things have changed,

So one of the downsides to setting goals is that you think you might be able to achieve a certain occupancy or a certain A DR, and by putting those a DR rates or your average daily rate in place to achieve that occupancy, you might not get booked when you need to get booked. And most of the time, if we get booked further out in the future, we usually get a little more money for our reservations.

And so this can really just flip the whole thing upside down. So that is my opinion. Again, if you totally disagree, I want to know why. I want some real facts, some real proof, maybe some real tests that you’ve done on your end To prove me wrong, I would love to hear it.

All right. Number six, and I know this is a tough one, especially for you growing property managers, but you need to stop over promising your services to new property owners I am, of course, not saying that you can’t do a good job, but a lot of times we see people promising things that maybe they just haven’t developed yet or they haven’t really figured out, or maybe they don’t have the team to handle. And so make sure when you’re bringing on new owners as a property manager, that you set lower expectations.

You can always go up from there, right.

All right, number seven. This is a big one, and I know this one’s hard to do, especially for a lot of you owners that have been building your own portfolio and that you actually own all these properties is stop trying to do everything yourself. I know this is easier said than done. I was doing everything myself when I first got started with my portfolio, but the reality is there’s too many roles and the more properties you add, the less likely that you can get away doing this, and the less likely it is that your properties are truly optimized 

If you’re trying to do it all yourself, well, at some point things are going to start breaking and it’s very likely things aren’t optimized right now, and at some point you are probably going to see your reviews decline a little bit. According to a recent Disney stat, I just spent quite a bit of time in Orlando where they have Disney World, 80% of negative guest experiences happen because the processes are not set up.

So keep that in mind, and when you come across some sort of issue or some sort of challenge, document it in the best way, you know possible. So that next time you don’t have to recreate that process. 

 and here we go onto the eight point, and maybe this is the most important one, and that is to stop being complacent. In the short term rental industry, guest expectations are higher than they’ve ever been. There’s more supply than there’s ever been, and there’s more information out there than there has ever been, and it’s really important that you’re tuning in to the right information.

I hope this gave you a little bit more insight.

These were just eight friendly reminders to help you continue to grow your property management business the best way possible. Thanks for tuning in again. Until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.

Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches Podcast. If you’ve been following along over the last six plus years, well, you’ve heard a lot about my journey. I’ve grown from my personal portfolio to now managing hundreds of properties in over 40 cities with my team. This growth definitely has not come without challenges.

And so I want to talk about a couple of the breaking points today, specifically the difference between you hosting maybe an individual property or even up to five versus. A portfolio of 10 to 20 units. There’s a lot of differences that happen there. There’s a lot of breaking points, and so if you’re planning on scaling, I want to give you some insight into what that’s going to look like and how you can make sure that you stay successful with your short-term rental operation.

Before we break down this scaling process, I wanna talk about just a couple sort of mindset shifts before you start to scale.

The first one is that you have to be willing to let go a little bit. You have to be willing to delegate tasks. Managing up to 20 properties yourself is a ton of work, and if you’re trying to do it all yourself can almost guarantee that there are certain things that are getting overlooked.

Part of scaling also requires that you have a team that goes back to delegation, and then for those of you out there are like, Tim, how the heck am I supposed to scale my portfolio? I don’t have any more money. Well, this is a big part of scaling a portfolio as well. If you’re coming from the investment side of things, well then there’s a lot of options.

You can partner with people. For example, you can raise money if you’ve been successfully operating short-term rentals for a while, well then you have credibility and there are people out there that will invest in you.

And if you’re going the property management route, well then everything we’re about to jump into is gonna save you from a world of hurt when you start to scale your portfolio.

Okay, so I’ve got eight sections here and I can’t go into them in extreme detail because this podcast episode would be hours and hours long. Before we get started, where is our experience coming from? Well, if you’re new to the show, my team and I have managed over 60,000 guests, hundreds of properties in over 40 cities, and also multiple countries.

And so we’re speaking from real world experience here and we’ve already gone through these growth phases and these bottlenecks.

Let’s start with operational processes. If you’re in the group of one to five units versus the 10 to 20, what it’s very likely that you either don’t have a lot of SOPs, standard operating procedures set up, or you actually have zero. If we think about it, you’re getting four times fewer reservations, so you’ve had four times fewer chances to create those systems that you know work Instead, what happens is an issue comes up, you rethink how you handled it in the past, and maybe that wasn’t even the optimal way, and then you do that again. So it’s a lot more exhausting versus having these procedures in place, which you will definitely need to have if you scale up to that 10 to 20 unit size.

My next point is on technology. When you have a really small portfolio, you’re very likely not using a lot of the industry leading tools. Or maybe you’re using one or two, but you actually don’t know how to take full advantage of those software tools versus the little larger portfolio up to 20 units.

You’ve had more repetition, you’ve had more practice.

And you have a better idea of how they work. Now, that doesn’t mean that you have them set up in an optimal way. It depends on the size of your team. If you’re handling everything yourself with 20 units, then you’re probably overlooking some things.

We also know that using software makes the guest experience better, or it can make the experience better, I should say, because it helps you stay more organized. And if you’re less organized, well then that’s gonna show up in the way you manage your guests.

if you have the small portfolio, well, you’re probably not on all the OTA platforms. You may not even be using dynamic pricing, where when you jump to having a larger portfolio, these tools become crucial. And if you’re not on all the OTAs, then you have exponential losses there, right? If you’re missing out on a whole bunch of bookings from booking.com, for example, but you have 20 properties instead of five, well, there’s way more revenue that you’re leaving on the table.

All right, next up. Let’s talk about housekeeping and maintenance. If you only have one property, well, it’s a lot easier to keep an eye on that in terms of maintenance and housekeeping. If you have 20, well then you have to have multiple people working with you, especially if they’re all in the same area.

Imagine 20 single family homes all checking out on a Sunday morning. You have to have multiple housekeepers. You have to have backup housekeepers, and you have to have an easy way to manage all of that and to confirm that things are getting cleaned accordingly.

next up, guest communication. A lot of this comes back to the fact that you just have far fewer reservations if you have fewer properties. And so the one to five portfolios, they’re probably doing a lot of guest communication themselves. Unfortunately, we know that short term rentals are really busy around the holidays and all the times that you probably want to take that off.

We have to have a really quick response times When it comes to our short term rentals, we know that’s a huge factor in our review scores, so you’re probably doing a lot of this yourself if you have the smaller portfolio, but if you have 20 units. You basically can’t, right? You need to have some help or you’re going to start slacking.

Your responses aren’t going to be as good, or they’re probably going to be delayed. Yes, we have a lot of AI tools available now. We have a lot of automations, but even with those in place, we know from managing tens of thousands of guests that the things that actually take a lot of time are usually not just the guest communication, it’s the issues that arise during a guest day.

Maybe they need to change their reservation. Maybe they had an issue checking into your property, whatever it happens to be, it’s the issues that actually end up taking a lot of time and not the typical guest communication, like sending check-in instructions.

All right, number five. Let’s talk about the differences between these portfolio sizes when it comes to revenue management. Well, five or less units versus 20. Again, there’s the scale thing going on. If they’re all in the same area, though, you have a pretty good idea of what your market’s doing. But what we find is that the smaller portfolios are not really fully understanding all of the aspects of a dynamic pricing tool, and there’s a lot of guessing going on there.

Maybe there is a note in the back of their head that said last year on New Year’s. This is what I did, and so I’m gonna try to get that. But maybe with that smaller portfolio, they’re not really looking at the market data. When you get up into the 20 unit portfolio, you have to make sure that you’re looking at all of these things because again, you have many more properties and if you’re losing revenue

and if you’re lagging behind with one property and you multiply that by 20, it adds up to be a ton of money that’s getting left on the table. Now, unfortunately, with both sizes of portfolio here, it doesn’t make sense to hire a revenue manager, right? That is an expensive position, and that is a position that requires a lot of skill.

In fact, in the hotel industry, after the general manager, which is the highest paid position. It’s the revenue manager that makes the most amount of money because assuming you have a good guest experience and your listings are advertised in the right place, they can tremendously underperform if they’re not priced right.

So if you’re in the larger portfolio side, it’s very likely you’re using a dynamic pricing tool. We use Price Labs. We also recommend Error DNA or Key Data. If you’re in the smaller portfolio size, do not rely on Airbnb’s smart pricing. Make sure you get a different tool.

If you’re in the larger portfolio size, getting up to 20, a lot of people are going with revenue managers, but unfortunately, there’s a bit of a disconnect there. If you have someone just managing your pricing, but they don’t know how your reviews are doing, or they’re not actively looking at your listings, well then they’re not seeing the whole picture there.

All right. Next up, when it comes to staffing and delegation, if you have that smaller portfolio, you’re probably trying to do everything yourself, and you’re probably doing a good job with your guest communications and your guest experience because you’re more hands on, but, .

It is probably unlikely that you’re actually optimizing that property’s performance. Now, I know there’s a lot of you out there that do a really good job, but if you’re not constantly looking at all the market data and you don’t have the luxury of having so many reservations come in to learn from, then you don’t have access to all the data.

So while we see the average review scores for these smaller portfolios are a lot of times higher than the larger portfolio, like a 20 unit, it doesn’t necessarily mean that those properties are all optimized.

Now, if you’re in the 10 to 20 unit range, you have to start delegating. Otherwise, you’re gonna be doing everything yourself and you’re very likely gonna be overlooking some things.

You’ll, you’ll want to consider having a virtual assistant. If you’re new to the show, you can go to t riches.com. We have tons of free eBooks that we’ve put together after thousands of hours in the industry. Learning things that you can do to help you scale your portfolio. To make the right decisions and to learn from our mistakes.

But hiring a VA is one of those first steps, but unfortunately, you can’t really stop there, right? If you’re hiring one person to try to replace a lot of the things that you’re already doing, it’s hard or it’s not realistic to expect that they can be an expert revenue manager, that they can handle expert guest communications, and that they can be available 24 7, right?

If you’re asking someone to be on call. 24 7. That’s not a super desirable position, right? And it often leads to some churn. So that size portfolio, I don’t see any other way around it. It is pretty difficult because you need more help. Now, shameless plug, Cosley works on the back end of your short-term rental operation.

That is our company we partner with. We’ve partnered with hundreds of properties around the US If you want us to take off the backend operations for you, but everything still stays under your name and your accounts. Well, we’d be happy to chat with you. I’d love to hear more about your properties.

You can go to scr riches.com. There’s a little partner with us button. We can jump on a quick call.

All right, number seven. When it comes to portfolio performance, a lot of our performance is based on our reviews. And if we’re scaling without help, without delegating, without using tools, then that shows up. In our reviews, we see those smaller portfolios typically have better reviews, but it definitely does not mean that they’re optimized.

So it’s hard to say who’s really less optimized, the larger portfolio or the smaller one. What we do know is the more properties you have, if they’re not completely optimized. Then you’re leaving money on the table, not just on a few properties, but on quite a bit more. So the impacts every little impact of things or changes that you make, like going on Google vacation rentals or adding your own direct booking site, or offering upsells or upselling gap nights or extending your average length of reservation.

All of those little changes are not impacting five properties, but they’re impacting 20, and so it makes a really big difference.

And to wrap things up, I want to come back to the mindset that you need to be able to manage these portfolios truly in an optimized fashion. Whether it’s the five units. Or it’s a 20.

The reality is that there are a lot of moving pieces in the short-term rental operation. If you have a full-time job, if you have family, well. The more properties you have, the more likely it is that some of these things are getting overlooked. I hope this channel’s helped provide some insights. I hope it’s helped optimize your properties in a lot of different ways.

Again, we have a ton of free eBooks on our website@sstrriches.com. Things that we’ve learned over the years.

And if you’re in a place where you’re just overwhelmed and you’re stressed out and you’re looking for other options, you of course have a full-time property management option, but you also have a virtual solution like working with us at Corley, and I would love to chat with you personally.

Again, you can head tot riches.com. I hope this episode gave you a little bit more insight and. Kind of the differences. It’s basically with your larger scale, everything gets magnified, and what we find is that a lot of people are not delegating, or if they are delegating, they’re not spending the time to train those people to truly be experts in those tasks that they’ve delegated.

Till next time, I hope your portfolio continues to grow, and I hope you have a fabulous week. 

Imagine waking up in a glass pod suspended from a cliff, or going to sleep under an icy glacier ceiling in Greenland. Today we’re diving into some of the world’s most extreme short-term rentals They will definitely push your limits, but also gets you thinking of what’s possible or maybe a potential trip in the future.

Stay tuned as we disconnect just a little bit and take a look at what some of the world’s most extreme short-term rentals have to offer.

Welcome back to the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast. I’m happy you’re here again. If you’ve been tuning in for a while, or if you’ve been in the short-term rental industry for a while, you know that there is a massive range of types of properties available. We have imit, we have Lakeside, we have Oceanside, but we also have a lot of extreme short-term rentals today.

And we’re gonna break down some of the world’s most extreme. But before we do, why is it that people are wanting to stay in these properties, and why is it that they can charge so much money? Well, the [00:01:00] first thing is because they’re in extreme locations, it makes it really difficult for a big hotel chain like Marriott or Hilton to go in and actually do that development.

The cost would just be too high, and so. That’s why it’s usually left to individual units. Why are people booking these? Well, they’re looking for new adventures. They’re looking for a digital detox.

Lots of guests just wanna unplug and reconnect with nature and off-grid, short-term rentals, give them the opportunity to do that.

Before we dive into some of the handpicked ones that our teams found across the world, I wanna give you a personal story of one of the most extreme Airbnbs I ever stayed at. This was deep in the jungles of Columbia, and if you’ve been tuning into the show for a while, you know, I spent a lot of time over the last decade living in Columbia.

In fact, we’re building a boutique resort there, but this property I booked for my birthday. I had a [00:02:00] Jeep there at the time. I wanted to get away, I wanted to disconnect, and so we headed out of the city. I was with my currently wife, girlfriend at the time. This was years ago, and we got out of the city and then we finally got off road and I’m following the instructions that were in the Airbnb, but they’re down a dirt road, a rocky, a bumpy road that needed four wheel drive.

I had four wheel drive, so I was prepared there, but I was not prepared for the rain to start pouring down, and then also eventually the sun to go down, and there were no streetlights out there. So it may get into this short term rental, incredibly hard. There was actually a point where I thought we were gonna have to turn around.

We were sliding down the mountain, going back and forth and back and forth, but there was so much rain that I just couldn’t make it. Luckily, a Colombian came by on their motorcycle from who knows where, and offered to push, and so [00:03:00] I’m there in the Jeep just shooting mud everywhere, unfortunately, over this poor Colombian ’cause he’s, he’s behind us, right?

There was no other way to do it. He was wearing a poncho, luckily. So he’s helping me get up, but we still cannot get up. And then out of nowhere, I swear another guy shows up on a motorcycle also in a poncho because the rain’s pouring down and Colombians are so nice. If you haven’t visited the country yet, you really need to check it out.

It’s highly recommended. And so I have two Colombians Complete strangers I’ve never met in my. Behind my Jeep, helping to push it up the mountain. And I’m just shooting so much mud over them. I swear we’ll have our editor put in some video clips. I know my wife was recording and taking photos as we were trying to make it up the mountain, and eventually we did.

I feel really bad though, because I couldn’t stop. If I were to have stopped, I would’ve slid right back down the mountain. And so of course I wanted to pay them for their support. Uh, but I couldn’t. So we took off. Finally we [00:04:00] made it to the short term rental, which was truly beautiful on the side of the mountain, in the jungle, super peaceful jacuzzi.

It was very nice, but it was a really hard time getting there, and so that affects your review score. Stay tuned. I’ll tell you how I actually reviewed this property in just a second,

But before we get to the details on that review and why I left it, let’s break down some of the most extreme short-term rentals our team could find.

One of our top picks for most extreme off-grid short-term rental. This one happens to be on a floating glacier in Greenland.

For those of you tune into podcast only, well, you can see all the beautiful photos, the videos if you tune into our YouTube channel at short-Term Rental Riches. I’m on this website for this property right now, and you can tell right away that this property offers an experience.

And by the price tag, you could expect it to be a pretty good experience. Well, north of $1,000 a [00:05:00] night, remember, the higher your nightly rate, the more expectations your guests are going to have.

This property has some amazing photos of people standing underneath glaciers of the sort of yurt looking, uh, tents, but very luxurious inside, floating on top of the water helicopters taking off, I mean. This is definitely an experience and this is what people are looking for. A lot of people, I should say, they’re looking for adventure.

Quick side story, my partner, Justin, who you’ve probably heard on the podcast, if you’ve been tuning in for a while, sent me a message not too long ago, earlier this year and said, Hey, Tim, something last minute came up. I’ve been wanting to do this trip. I’m heading to Greenland to do it. Get this an 80 kilometer hike through the snow.

I was like. Dude, are you serious? Uh, and you’re going by yourself like, that sounds pretty crazy. Uh, he ended up having an amazing experience. He stayed in [00:06:00] several different accommodations. It turned into a dog sledding adventure. He met people and that’s why people are looking for these types of experiences because they’re never going to forget them.

So we’ll see if we can find some clips from his journey and include them on this video as well.

Next up we have the Sky Lodge Adventure Suites, and this is one, I have to confess that. I might not even want to stay out because it is so extreme. This is a property suspended from the side of a cliff.

In order to get to it, guests either have to climb or take a zip line. Obviously, there’s a lot of liability that comes along with this type of property. The ones that we’ve picked for you today are around the world, and so insurance requirements and all those things change depending where you are.

This one happens to be in Peru, and it definitely offers some upscale amenities like gourmet meals and wine, and it reflects in the price tag as well at [00:07:00] over $600 a night. And for a property in Peru suspended on the side of a cliff, that’s a pretty high price tag. I gotta say. I don’t think I would probably want to stay in this one.

I got a little, little fear of heights.

But I would say if I ever did stay in it, I definitely wouldn’t forget it. ’cause I probably wouldn’t be sleeping.

Next up, we have a yurt in Mongolia surrounded by National Parks, lakes, and waterfalls. Some of the available tours include eagle scouting.

You’ve got local opportunities to go out there with eagle hunters. How many people do you know that have been hunting eagles? Actually, that sounds. Kind of crazy. I think that’s definitely illegal, uh, in the us. But who knows In Mongolia, maybe there’s just an extreme amount of eagles out there. You’re in the wilderness.

If you’re checking out the photos or the video, you can see that this place is surrounded by snow. Definitely remote. Definitely a place or an adventure or an experience. You will not [00:08:00] forget.

You also note that this property is a lot cheaper at $135 a night. So while it is very extreme, it’s not offering a lot of those luxury amenities like the gourmet meals and wine and Peru, for example.

So remember, our price tags have to match our guest expectations and our listing profiles have to do a really good job of explaining exactly what our property is like.

Otherwise, you’ll find yourself with not so great reviews.

All right, next up, no one would be expecting this one, but sleeping underwater with sharks in Paris. And I know you’re probably thinking what that, like where in Paris? How could you do that? Well, it’s actually in a giant aquarium, and this is a property that partnered with Airbnb e.

It’s called the Glass Shark Suite and it’s surrounded by 360 views. Have you guessed it? Sharks?

A truly unique stay was [00:09:00] actually designed to raise. Shark awareness and they offer one night stays there. I do not know the price. It’s very possible that this property just got booked up and it’s not available at all. And that’s something that we find with unique stays, right? Because they’re unique and they’re extreme.

There are not a lot of them. And so when the word gets out and people understand or see how great these experiences are, more people want to book ’em. And those calendars fill up quickly. Also, another great reason to have a direct booking website. These types of properties also lend themselves really well to social media because they can go viral, right?

How many properties do you know that you can sleep in an aquarium with sharks?

So a couple quick tips on extreme stays or accommodations if you’re planning on having one yourself or renting one yourself, and then I’ll give you my final review score for that Columbia property. The first thing is you gotta make sure that it’s [00:10:00] accessible. Set those expectations really, really clearly.

If you are in a place that’s really hard to get to, we’ll make sure that you have required transportation, for example.

You wanna pull out things that guests love about your property. If you’re offering one of these unique type of stays, we can find all those comments in the reviews. But we also want to ask them for their feedback as well. And one of the things that’s undoubtedly gonna be a common thread through these types of properties is just disconnecting from the city life or the work life, doing something different and creating an incredible experience.

You wanna remember to price according to the uniqueness and the exclusivity. If you are charging too much and you’re not meeting those guest expectations, then you’re not gonna get that greater reviews.

People still want to be comfortable, even if it is an extreme accommodation. So if you’ve got a really high price tag, [00:11:00] make sure that you’ve included as many of those modern comforts as you possibly can. And if you’re not able to, that any of those things that someone would expect are clearly mentioned in your listing.

All right, so there we go. Those are some of the world’s most extreme off-grid short-term rentals. I left the Columbia property a. Five star review because it just was such a great experience. I mean, it was really out in the middle of nowhere. Uh, a lot of things go into that though, right? I mean, I’m sort of biased because I’ve been working with short term rentals for over a decade.

We’ve had thousands of thousands of guest reservations, and our team works with hundreds of properties in over 40 cities. So I guess for, uh, an individual owner. Uh, especially in Columbia where the standards are a little lower than they might be in the US or Europe. Uh, I just have kind of like a soft spot for someone trying to do a really good job, and my feedback to them is make those expectations more clear.

But [00:12:00] you absolutely have amazing property. I loved it and I would recommend it.

So while these retreats aren’t for everyone, there’s definitely a segment of the market that’s looking for them and willing to pay for them. If you’ve got some crazy short-term rental stories of your own, we’d love to hear about ’em.

Please put ’em in the comments. It’d be a lot of fun to read. Until next time, I hope you have a fab this week.

In today’s episode, we’re diving into the short term rental crystal ball for 2026. No, I don’t have an exact crystal ball, but I do have a pretty good idea and I’m super excited about some of the changes taking place. Everything from changing markets to technology. To management trends and investment opportunities, especially, I’m diving into why I’m more excited this coming year about the opportunities we have as an STR investor than I have been in years.

Stay tuned.

Welcome back to the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast. I’m happy you’re here again, and I’m excited to do my outlook, my take on what to expect in 2026. And believe me, we got a lot of good changes coming if you’ve been tuning into the show for a long time. Well, you know, we started. As their real estate podcast, but with a focus on short-term rentals.

I used to talk a lot about real estate investing in general and the fundamentals, but I haven’t done so much of that in the last few years because it just hasn’t been that great of a time to be investing

with interest rates. Higher cash flow was down and with higher property values. Things just got really competitive and so I personally haven’t purchased anything in several years. Yes, I’ve been building a new construction project for quite a while. Excited to share updates on that in the near future, but I haven’t actually acquired any new short-term rentals.

I’ve been focused on managing those properties that already have in my portfolio as best as we possibly can, My team and I have also expanded to manage hundreds of your properties as well, and so that’s been an awesome journey. We have a ton of insight and I’m excited to break down some of those details But let’s take a step back first and let’s talk about the economy in general, because what happens in the long-term rental or residential real estate world really affects short-term rentals, and we have some fundamental changes taking place as we speak.

We talked about interest rates already recently on episode three 18, so if you missed that one, go back and check it out. One of the highlights from that episode was that interest rates are going down, they’ve already gone down, and they’re forecasted to continue going down.

So this is music to my ears. This is also part of the reason why I’ve recently put up several properties for sale. I’m gonna be doing some exchanges and finally moving some things around, because as interest rates come down, that means more people can afford to buy properties, and that means more properties are going to be changing hands.

So we don’t know exactly how far they’re going to come down, but the good news is they’re headed in the right direction. We also had a very significant tax change that happened in 2025, and that is that the return of a hundred percent bonus appreciation came back.

And that is also great news for a real estate investor. That’s also more incentive for someone to purchase real estate.

Because as we know, real estate provides more tax benefits than any other investment class available.

Now, a lot of you have also heard of Trump’s proposal for a 50 year mortgage, and you might think at first that that is just the dumbest thing that you’ve ever heard, because someone will pay twice as much interest as they would with a 30 year loan. But as a real estate investor, this is good news.

The whole idea of real estate investing is cash flow, right? We buy a property expecting to earn more than our expenses, and one of those really big expenses are our loan payment. And so if we can lower our loan payment on a fixed basis, then we have the potential to earn more cash flow. And the best part of the story is that you’re not actually the person paying down that loan, That would be your long-term tenants or your short-term rental guests.

And remember, with an investment loan, you also get to deduct all of your interest off of that loan. And so if you’re paying more interest, you have more deduction. 

So whether you think 50 year mortgages is a great thing or a really stupid thing, the reality is that it’s going to make properties more affordable for people because the monthly payment is going to be lower and the more affordable a property is. The more people will try to buy it. So my prediction for 2026 is that housing prices are gonna continue to go up.

And I know there’s tons of doom and gloomers out there, YouTube channels dedicated to freaking you out, but that’s not my take.

And I actually don’t even see how that’s possible because we are at a historic low for inventory. There’s a roughly 850,000 homes available for sale in the US Now that rates are going down, we have more tax advantages, and we’ll potentially have a longer loan term, that all means more demand , and that simply means that prices should continue to go up.

Now with interest rates being lower and expected to continue to go down, this means that a lot of short-term rental owners out there that maybe weren’t performing that well are gonna list their properties for sale.

And this creates a really good opportunity for any of us savvy, short-term rental investors that really know how to operate a property and optimize its performance, optimize its revenue.

We’re gonna get into a few of the management changes happening nationwide in just a quick second.

So just because things are looking good in the economy doesn’t mean that every market is good for short-term rental investments. Of course, there have been lots of regulations passed. Barcelona just banned short-term rentals, for example. I think that that will continue, but not overwhelmingly.

I think it’ll continue to happen in places that are more dense and that are higher priced. A lot of times, like coastal areas like Los Angeles, like Miami.

Another trend that I see in the short term rental industry that I do not see going away, and I see picking up speed is the trend in midterm rentals. And this in part comes from regulations, right? If you have a market that’s limited your property to a 39 plus stay, well then you’re no longer gonna be a short-term rental host.

You’re gonna be a midterm rental host.

If you missed our episode with the CEO of Furnish finer, go back and check that out. That was episode 3 0 8. 

That episode was full of reasons that might lead you to want to go down the midterm rental route. But one of the main ones is, is that it’s just easier to manage midterm rentals than it is short-term rentals, right? Because you have less reservations, it’s much closer to a long-term rental. Maybe your guest is there for a month or three months versus two or three nights.

We also know that a lot of short-term rental markets saw a huge increase in supply. Tons of properties came on the market and, and a lot of the dense urban areas, the midterm rental strategy can become a really good one.

Now, you don’t necessarily need to go full midterm rental, right? Your property may be in an area that’s suited really well for short-term rentals, but during the high season, and then you switch to midterm rentals. So the goal is to optimize revenue with your property. But I do see midterm rentals continuing to grow in popularity, and there’ll be more and more, and there’s also gonna be a lot to figure out.

On the operation side of that because we basically have two different segments, right? We have the long-term rentals and short-term rentals, and they both have really good tools, but those haven’t really merged yet into the midterm rental space. So I’m excited to see what comes out in 2026.

All right, let’s jump into operations and management, and this is really the key success for any investment property. You can have the nicest property in the world, but if you don’t know how to manage it well, it’s not going to do well. Right? 

And we see this over and over again with short-term rentals, where a property that maybe doesn’t look as nice as the one right next door earns way more money. So it really comes down to the operations and we’re seeing some really big trends happen, especially with the national property managers like Vac Casa.

I’ve got some stats right from Air DNA. I’m just gonna go ahead and read them off. From 2019 to 2024, the churn rate for property managers with a 4.7 average review score or higher is around nine to 11% per year. That means they’re losing nine to 11% of their customers, of their owners per year.

Doesn’t mean that they’re not adding properties, it just means that’s how many they’re losing. That’s their churn rate.

Now, if we look at property managers that have a 4.7 or lower, last year in 2024, their turn rate was 24%. Imagine that. Imagine your Vac Casa, and let’s just say they had 10,000 properties. They have much more than that. That means they were losing 2,400 properties per year, and it makes sense why, right? If you don’t have a, at least a 4.7 review score.

You’re not going to earn as much money with your properties,

and we’ve seen that these large property managers do not do a great job locally. Of course, not in all markets, right? They can do a good job in a lot of them, but as a whole, we’re looking at their average review score.

It is going down, and I expect those to continue to go down.

So it’s not looking good for large property managers or nationwide property managers that don’t have a good grasp on their local management.

That’s one of the reasons my team and I have been partnering with owners like you across the nation to work with your local team, but to take all the headache away on the back end.

We help you optimize your properties. We handle all the guest communication, we handle revenue management, listing, setup, everything on the backend, and we’ve been seeing really, really good results. So if you’re interested in chatting with us, you can head to t riches.com. There’s a little partner with us button, and we’d love to jump on a call with you and talk about your properties.

Another trend that we’ve been seeing, and I expect to continue our shorter booking windows.

Guess are booking your properties with less and less time in advance, and that means that your revenue management strategy has to change. If your average booking window used to be four weeks, but now it’s two weeks and you have some last minute discounts set up in there, well, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

So those are things you really need to understand about your specific property and your market. And another thing that we’re seeing is that everyone’s using a dynamic pricing tool now, right?

So if everyone’s using the same dynamic pricing tools, then how can you actually get your property to perform better? Well, you need to look at some things that the pricing tools aren’t accounting for. Those would be things like your specific review score or your channel markups between the different OTAs.

We’re gonna get to the OTAs here in just a second. You want to consider things like promos on those different travel sites,

And of course, you need to know who your ideal guest avatar is and make sure that the marketing on your property speaks exactly to that person.

According to Air, DNA supply has been growing nationwide around 3% per year, but that growth is slowing.

A lot of people got into the short-term rental market, and I think 2026, there’s gonna be quite a few people getting out. They realized it’s just way too hard. Maybe they’re not making as much money as they wanted. So supply and demand is one of those other things that you’re gonna want to keep a very close eye on if your market is losing supply.

Then you should be able to increase your prices.

2026. Your review scores are gonna continue to be more important than ever, and I know I say this all the time, but we can see just the way the OTAs are set up now that they’re really prioritizing their top properties. Airbnb created their guest favorite badge, for example.

Which means they’re no longer looking at the host’s ability to manage a portfolio properties, but they’re breaking it down to specific properties, and we know that the guest favorite badge goes a long way in your visibility.

According to Air DNA, the difference in average RevPAR from a top performing property to an average performing property. Is over 15% and now that is an average. So it’s really hard to bucket all the properties together. And we know that there are some that are earning way more, even twice as much as a similar type property because they’re doing an excellent job at revenue management.

They’re listing set up perfectly and they have excellent, excellent review scores.

So to sum up the operations and management, we’re seeing these national property managers basically lose all their business because they’re not doing a good job.

And on the flip side, it means that if you’re doing a really good job, there’s a lot of opportunity to outperform your competition.

Okay onto technology. I couldn’t do an outlook or a forecast for 2026 without including artificial intelligence. And we’ve done episodes on this in the past, but I believe. A hundred percent. 2026. There’s gonna be way more AI in the short-term rental industry than there has ever been, and for a couple reasons.

First of all, it doesn’t forget anything, and if it knows all the details about your property, then it can respond much faster than you can.

And one of the big ones is its tone, the weight. It actually can, and I say can because it really depends on how you have this set up, but how it can communicate with guests. It’s not going to get upset when it receives a message from a guest that’s mad because maybe the miss or flight or whatever it happens to be.

It’s always gonna respond with the best tone possible.

Humans, for example, we don’t have that luxury. We’re emotional creatures, right? And so if we get a response from a guest that says they didn’t like our property, but we love our property, and we put our heart and soul into it, well, we might be inclined to respond in a way that that’s not perfect. I guess you could say it could be emotionally driven, where AI does not have that downfall.

The other big place that we’re gonna be seeing AI is actually in the way that people find our properties. So I don’t know about you, but I haven’t used Google in a long time. I use chat PT or Claude or Gemini. You pick your favorite to do all of my web browsing these days, and I’m sure you’ve noticed when you search for something, it gives you links to websites.

So SEO, the old search engine optimization is kind of going out the window. Right? And now we have what they’re calling a EO, which is content driven,

and AI is gonna be searching for answers that they can provide all of their users. So having some specific keywords is less important than actually providing a good overall answer. 

Hopefully you have a direct booking website and on that direct booking website, you’re gonna want to have some really good content that a potential guest would be searching for in your market.

One other place that AI is going to affect search is actually directly on the OTAs, like Airbnb or booking.com. You’ve probably noticed that on Airbnb. They ask you for a lot of personal information. Now you don’t have to give it all away, but the idea behind that is that they want to start matching guest profiles with host profiles.

Booking dot com’s doing the same thing. And so the properties that are now showing up on these search results are all driven by some algorithms and AI in the background trying to make the perfect match.

And that leads me to the next trend that we’re already seeing, and that is definitely not going away in 2026. And that is the rise of other OTAs, other online travel agencies, not just Airbnb. booking.com is making a lot of headway. We get tons and tons of really great reservations from booking.com.

So if you’re not on there yet, go to str riches.com, check out our prior episodes. We’ve done lots of episodes just on booking.com and how to get it set up on their platform the right way.

We know that booking dot com’s releasing a damage protection program similar to Airbnb’s, so I expect them to gain a lot more traction in the US in 2026.

But it’s not just booking.com, that’s gonna be growing Google Vacation rentals. Other sites like WIM Stay or Hopper, if you’re not on these platforms yet, well, it’s very likely that your property management software already has a connection with them, and we want to get maximum visibility on all of these OTAs.

Of course, you can have different channel markups between the different channels. We know that Airbnb just changed their host fee. So it’s much higher than it used to be. You wanna make sure that you have those markups in place,

Assuming you have those markups jump on the other platforms, you’re going to get more visibility. And more visibility means more demand. More demand for your property means more bookings.

2025 has been an awesome year. But I’m really excited for 2026, not just because of the real estate fundamentals, allowing us investors to have more opportunity, potential for more cash flow, but also because there’s just gonna be a lot of properties changing hands, right? And so if you’ve been on the sideline and you haven’t quite got your first short term rental yet, 2026 is your year.

But remember, just because you find a good property at a good price doesn’t mean it’s going to perform well. You have to make sure you’ve crossed your T’s and dotted your I’s and you know what you’re doing when it comes to operations.

I hope this show has helped provide you some tips. That is my goal, and until next week, I hope you have a fab this week. 

Speaker: [00:00:00] You do not wanna miss today’s show. Today’s guest has quite literally the largest network in the real estate industry out of anyone I’ve ever met in my life. He’s regularly interacting with Robert Kiyosaki and the Rich Dad Group. He puts on tons of shows. He has one of the industry’s longest running podcast, the Real Estate Guy Radio.

He’s been featured on Fox. On MSN, he’s had founders of Forbes and you name it, he is connected and he is a wealth of knowledge. So in today’s episode, we’re gonna be breaking down little bits of different pieces of what it takes to be a successful real estate investor and also what it takes to get you to the next level.

So stay tuned. You are not going to wanna miss today’s show.

Speaker 2: welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. I’m happier you’re here again. It is an absolute [00:01:00] pleasure to have our guest on today. He’s someone that I’ve learned a wealth of knowledge from.

He runs. The real, one of the industry’s largest and most impactful real estate shows that exist. Um, and he’s just a wealth of knowledge. Robert Helms, welcome to the show. Hey Tim, thanks for having me. Great to see you, my friend. It is great to see you as well and I’m excited to, uh, just chat today. I mean, you really have had a really big influence on my life, I think, uh, I came across your podcast over a decade ago now, which is kind of crazy to think about, but over the years, gone to a lot of your conferences.

Uh, got to meet. You know, with you a lot. Um, and so it’s been really great learning from you and from all the, the amazing content that you put out there. Um, can you give us just a little bit of background, Robert, on the show and, and on all of your, all your real estate experience really. 

Speaker 3: Well, when the, uh, calendar flips over to 2026, it’ll be our 30th year of broadcast, which is [00:02:00] crazy.

When, uh, Charlie and I, my original co-host started the show years ago, uh, we figured, uh, we’d make a list of all the real estate topics and there were about a hundred. So we thought, well, if we do a show once a week, that’s two years. So that’s, that’ll be good. Two years will be done. And, uh, here we are 30 years later because of course, as you know, uh, things change.

There were short term rentals back then, but we didn’t call ’em that. Right. And there wasn’t a whole industry around it. And so because the market changes so much, you just have to stay up to date. So now for 29 years, we’ve been, uh, almost every week, uh, bringing in ideas and topics and guests and. Or ask the guy shows and all those things to try to help explain, uh, where the market is going and how to be positioned for it.

So it’s, uh, it’s great to be talking to folks who are interested in short-term rentals because there is so much opportunity still, uh, in that space, as you know. I don’t have to tell you that. Um, and you know, I [00:03:00] always think that before you’re, uh, uh, you were talking about before, you’re a short term real estate investor.

You’re a real estate investor, and before you’re a real estate investor, you’re an investor. Which means that you live below your means and you put, uh, aside some productive capital and you go do something with it. And as chapter one of Rich Dad, poor Dad teaches us the rich don’t work for money. They let their money work for them.

And that’s how we go out into the world and, uh, create these returns. But we, we, as real estate investors, we swim in the sea of, uh, all the other economic factors. So, you know, the real estate guys we’re. We’re front and center real estate, but we also talk about the broader picture. As you know, like our investor summit that you’ve been on many, many times.

We always bring in macro economists and people that understand not just real estate, but how markets work and how the Fed works and how money works and the things we sometimes take for granted. 

Speaker 2: Yeah. No, I, I, I, I would say if, if I hadn’t been going [00:04:00] to all of your conferences, Robert, or a lot in the past or just listening to this show, there’s so many things that I would’ve done differently and, and not in a good way.

You know, you guys just have such a. Such a wealth of knowledge, you know, interest rates, for example, I remember refinancing all of my properties. You guys were like, Hey, interest rates are going up. Uh, there’s no way around it. And now here we are years later in an environment that’s been higher than. Uh, you know, what earlier, new investors have been used to, but still historically low.

Uh, when we, when we look across, um, you know, historic numbers, you have met with and had so many amazing guests on your show, Robert, you continue to, I’m curious, um, you know, what’s one of the like mindset things that. You’ve discovered from your guests that maybe a, a newbie investor doesn’t, doesn’t have.

Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, everybody brings something to the [00:05:00] table and I always wanna understand the guest’s perspective. So a comment they make can be taken in context. But I’ll tell you that from a mindset point of view, uh, they, they say, and I’ve not been able to find this quote, but they say, I’m a big quote guy, as you know, that Mark Twain said that you shouldn’t wait to buy real estate, that you should buy real estate and wait.

Meaning that over time real estate and investing in real estate heals almost all wounds because real estate as an asset is completely different than any other asset class. And this is one of the big mindsets, uh, to get square right, right away. So I’m asked to speak at lots of different conferences, not just real estate conferences, and I’m often representing real estate.

As an asset class. So there’ll be someone there who’s talking about metals, and there’ll be someone there who’s talking about oil and gas, and someone who’s talking about the stock market and someone who’s talking about crypto. And these are the different asset classes, except there’s a [00:06:00] huge distinction that no one ever makes except usually me on a panel that every single investment.

In oil or gas or the stock market or mutual funds or cryptocurrency, every single dollar you put into any of those asset classes is discretionary. You don’t have to buy a barrel of oil or an ounce of gold or a share of stock. It’s a hundred percent discretionary. You can sit out economically every one of those asset classes forever, but you can’t sit out real estate.

From an economic perspective, you’re gonna have to interact with real estate. Doesn’t mean you have to own a property, but if you don’t, you’re gonna have to rent one. Whether that means for a couple of nights or every month for your office or the home you live in, you cannot sit out the market. So for that reason, real estate is completely different.

It doesn’t really count as an asset class. Although arguably it’s one of the biggest asset classes if you look at the aggregate value, but it just behaves differently. I think you have [00:07:00] to get your mindset around that. And this is especially true for folks that have found real estate from some other background.

You know, I’ve been putting money in the stock market, or I’ve invested in silver and gold and now all real estate seems interesting. I’ll, I’ll jump into that. And they approach it the same way, but it’s not the same kind of an asset class. And so it also doesn’t react perfectly. Like no matter what I do today, it’s not gonna affect the price of a share of Nvidia.

I can yell at my computer screen, I can buy all kinds of chips. It’s not gonna affect that. But with real estate, there’s so many things we can do personally that affect the value of property. And two properties built by the same builder, uh, right next door to each other, don’t sell at the same price anymore because of all the things that have changed and make them unique.

So I think from a mindset perspective, it’s, it’s that part that real estate’s not like everything else. 

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. There’s so much opportunity with it. Um, [00:08:00] you know, uh, you, you wrote a book a long time ago. Uh, you wrote a book a long time ago called Equity Happens, which I, uh, was lucky enough to pick up a copy of.

Um, and that talks about one of the fundamental pieces of, you know, invested in real estate is that equity happens. Can you explain that a little bit more? 

Speaker 3: Yeah, so equity is the good part. It’s my favorite words. It’s the part of the property that you own. If you bought a hundred thousand dollars rental home, if you could find one of those and you put 20% down, we call that purchase equity, and the bank loans you 80%.

Now the house is still worth a hundred thousand, but your portion is only the 20,000 that you put down. And you could argue, well, if we sold it today, we’d have to pay some costs. So that 20,000 isn’t even 20,000. But the magic happens over time because over time, rents are gonna go up. Most likely the value’s gonna go up most likely not every month, not even every year, but over 10 or 20 or 30 years.

It’s virtually impossible to find a market anywhere in the United [00:09:00] States or most countries that if you bought a property at one day and sold 10 years later that it wasn’t worth more. You’d have to really look to find a market that is down. Over 10 years. So long-term real estate goes up in value. And here’s a cool part.

As your rental property goes up, your tenants, whether they’re renting by the night or the week or the month or the year, your tenants are paying down your mortgage when they make the payment to you and you make your mortgage payment. At first, it’s mostly interest, which is deductible and a little bit of principle, but over time the principle amount of the pay down goes up until, imagine a scenario where you’ve owned the property 30 years, the loan was 30 years.

The tenants have made that payment. Now they have paid off your loan and used to loan the house. You now have a hundred percent equity. So our point in equity happens is that the market gives you some equity. My house would’ve been value, but my loan didn’t go up because the house went up. [00:10:00] No, my loan’s going down if it’s amortized.

Uh, but also there’s other types of equity. One of my favorites is found equity, and that’s because as we mm-hmm. Alluded to with the stock price, there may be someone who needs to sell a house for a reason outside its current value, and they are become a, don’t want a motivated seller. So I’m able to acquire a property for a lot less than the market value, which means I found some equity.

You can also force equity when you buy the ugly duckling and you work to make it better. Sure there’s cost involved, but if you do it right, there’s even some profit margin beyond that. And so that way you can force equity. There’s developer, uh, or phased equity. When a developer builds a track of 200 homes, usually the first 20 sell for a lower price than the last 20 Do.

So if I buy early in that and I write it out to the end, then I’ve experienced phased equity. And then there’s the whole capital stack, which is all the money necessary for a property. As that capital [00:11:00] stack gets compressed and diminished, equity on the other hand grows. And so it’s just the part that you own.

And if you do it right, which means if you buy in the right places and you buy the right property and you manage it well, then equity’s gonna happen to you. 

Speaker 2: Yep. That’s awesome. That’s why we love real estate. Uh, I think that last piece that you mentioned there though, if you manage it right, is one of the really, really important factors because you can find equity, uh, you can force equity, you can have your tenants pay down your property over time.

But if you don’t manage your tenants well or if you don’t manage the project well, then unfortunately the outcome is not great. And I know Robert, you’ve. You’ve been involved in all sorts of projects, hundreds of millions of dollars of, of projects, of all different types. You also in the, the hospitality sector.

Can you talk to us a little bit about management and how important that is to the return [00:12:00] of an investment? 

Speaker 3: It is likely the single most important thing you need to buy in a right market and you need to have the right financing and you need to make sure you’ve done your homework about costs and all of that.

But management is where the rubber meets the road. And the example I like to give is you go out looking at houses with a realtor and he goes, oh yeah, these houses, these rent for $1,800 a month. And then you interview the property manager who says 1475. Because the property manager is the one that has to deliver the result.

And not that we don’t love real estate agents, but they don’t know it’s not their business to lease out the property. Mm-hmm. I they heard they were renting for 1800 or one guy paid 1800. Well, that’s the guy that moved out and forced a sale. And now if I’m gonna buy that house, I’m only gonna get 1475. I might wanna offer 1450.

So it fills up. So management is everything, and it’s not just in individual, uh, homes. It’s the same thing in apartments, it’s the same thing in retail and commercial. It’s the same thing. In hospitality, it’s the same thing. In [00:13:00] farming, the management is the operation. The tool is the real estate. So you can buy the world’s greatest tool, whatever that means for you, whether that’s a chainsaw or a fishing pole, or whatever your tool is.

But if you don’t learn how to use it. Or have someone who knows how to use it, then the tool does you no good sitting in the toolbox. And real estate’s just a tool to accomplish all these wonderful things. Appreciation and cashflow and tax benefit. All of those benefits only come if the property is managed well.

And so I think that for whatever reason, it seems like to me, especially single family homes, that the property manager is the least respected. And most important person in the whole shooting match. That’s true. They have to keep it full, they have to keep it working. Right. All those things. Uh, and meanwhile, you know, we’re looking at markets and running spreadsheets and talking to lenders.

None of that is gonna mean a hill of beans if you don’t have someone that manages the property well. 

Speaker 2: [00:14:00] Yeah, excellent point. And I think when we look at the short term rental industry, we see that. But on an, on a magnified level, because in the long term world, you know, you might have two properties, maybe you think it can rent for, uh, 1500, but your property manager is telling you 1300.

They have a lot of the insight. But in, in the short term rental world, there’s such a bigger range. You know, that range instead of being 13 to 1500 might be 1300 to 3,500. Uh, but it really does come down to. To the management. Well, let’s, well, it’s critical, it’s short term 

Speaker 3: because there’s another really interesting, and I think, important point for people that listen to your podcast, which is most short-term rental owners.

Are never gonna bother to listen to this podcast because they don’t take it seriously. They don’t think of themselves as investors. They have a house that couldn’t rent, or they have a vacation house and they’re trying to liquidate some of the cost. That’s not your competitor, right? That’s not good management.

That’s not even management. [00:15:00] The majority of short term rentals are not managed very well at all, which is why the majority of short-term rentals don’t make the owner any money at the end of the day. But this is not for you. If you’re listening to this podcast, you are learning all those distinctions that create true ROI because of management.

And it’s something I’ve watched you do over the years. Tim is really take it seriously. I mean, you’ve taught this stuff, you, you’ve figured it out by doing it, not by reading books and. Because of who you are, you share those ideas with other people. It becomes a, a, a amazing what you can do when not everybody’s watching the store.

And so I think it’s true for a lot of asset classes, you know, I’m in big hospitality and big hospitality. You wouldn’t think about just, you know, waltzing in one day and deciding to manage your own front desk. Yeah, I think I’ll just, I’ll be the bellhop today. No, I’m gonna work in the restaurant today.

You know, I, I can’t even get near the kitchen. I mean, they keep me out of there, [00:16:00] right? Because I’m not gonna add any value. Instead, you manage through systems and practices and procedures and policies, all of which drives me crazy. But it’s what creates the return. And so you don’t want to just have good management, you need to have way above average management.

’cause the average manager doesn’t do very well in real estate. So just don’t be ordinary. Nobody’s listening to this show because they wanna be average and ordinary, right? A few little distinctions. It doesn’t take hundreds of things. It takes just a few distinctions to be better than the next guy.

Speaker 2: That’s right. Yeah. Excellent advice, Robert. And, and thanks again. Yeah. For all the content that you put out because I think, you know, listening to shows like yours is what gives people, uh, an edge. You know, they’re studying, they’re staying up on the market. Um, we’re seeing a lot of changes right now, a lot that I’m super excited about.

You know, interest rates have come down a little bit. Uh, what are your thoughts on that? 

Speaker 3: Yeah. Gosh, this [00:17:00] is such a can of worms. I just love the fact that we used to be able to get interest rates of two and three and 4%, but I don’t think it’s coming back. I don’t think we should have had those rates.

That’s a longer discussion. But I think the reasons behind the fundamentals weren’t fundamental. I mean, it doesn’t make any sense. And like everybody, I was wallowing a bit when interest rates moved up. Not only did they move up a lot, but they moved up quickly. And then my buddy Kenny McElroy got in a conversation with me and he goes, you know, I was doing some math, which is something you don’t hear Ken do very often, but he said I was doing some math and the time that you and I have been in investing, so Ken and I are almost the same age.

He’s my slightly younger friend and uh, we’ve been investing in real estate about the same period of time. He says, during the time you and I have been investors, the average interest rate that we’ve paid when we buy properties is higher than the current interest rate. And this is when rates hit like seven and a half.

And I’m like, mm-hmm. You know what? You are right. If I go back and look at the properties that I bought 10 years [00:18:00] ago, those ones are great, right? The ones that were 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, gosh, we were paying 12. 11. My dad was paying 16 and 18. You knew my dad. Um, PE people, people would just be amazed that we could make real estate deals work at those rates, but they did.

And so the point is, to me, rates right now seems super low. To people have only invested the last 10 years. They think rates are super high. So this is that mindset thing too. It’s always compared to what, it’s always based on your perspective, but I think if you can’t make the deal work at today’s interest rates, then the deal’s not gonna work.

It’s a great reason to consider short-term rentals because the same property can yield a lot more income. Now, obviously there’s more expenses too, but the expenses don’t creep up as much as the income does when you manage it well. So I’m not holding my breath for interest rates to go lower. However, having said that.

Here’s the cool thing [00:19:00] about real estate. I only negotiate the price of the property one time, but I can negotiate the financing as many times as I want to on one to four units. If the rate’s lower and it makes sense for me to refi, then I can do that if the rates go up. I’ll be happy I have the loan I got today.

So it is a moving platform. I think we’re gonna see a little more easing of interest rates, especially if a current president has anything to do with it. But in reality, the President doesn’t influence interest rates very much. It’s not how it works. So he may wanna scream at the Fed Chairman and say, lower the rates, but there’s more to it than that.

And so as we’re watching. Who makes loans, not the Federal Reserve. In fact, the rates that we hear so much about have nothing to do with interest rates. On, on mortgages, but they are informed by that. So business people, mm-hmm. Who make these loans are the ones that are looking at competition and demand and supply and their cost of capital and putting all that [00:20:00] together to create loan products.

And when you see those rates come, go down. That just didn’t happen by accident or because someone flipped a switch. That’s because they have studied the demand in the marketplace. I think we will see more and, and here’s the deal. Every half point in interest rate that we get some relief of has a huge effect throughout the economy.

All of a sudden, those houses you were thinking about buying do make sense. All of a sudden that refinance that you wish you could do, you can do and that’s gonna unlock lots of purchasing power. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely. And there’s, there’s also some other things for, I guess, the less seasoned investor with interest rates that aren’t.

Totally obvious, you know, like we get to write off our interest as a deduction. Uh, if we look at inflation for example, and we look at the cost of money with interest, like what we’re paying for a loan is actually quite a bit lower, uh, than what it seems. And yeah. [00:21:00] So yeah. Um, great advice there, Robert, as always, uh, I think in the short term rental market, you know.

People got into a lot of short term rentals, not just as a sole investment. You know, a lot of people love traveling to a specific place and so they, they decided to buy a second home there hoping to, uh, generate extra cash flow. But that didn’t work out or hasn’t worked out in a lot of places where they saw big.

So I think with, you know, even just a small change in rates, some people that weren’t managing well, coming back to managing, uh, are going to be, uh. You know, sell some properties. I think some of these short-term rental old markets are gonna get shaken up just a little bit. Um, but those that are managing well will continue to manage well and, and earn more.

Uh, and that, I guess that leads me to another point. A lot of times when someone’s doing a really good job managing. Properties, uh, or investing or just getting all the pieces right. [00:22:00] They use up all their money and, but they want to keep investing in real estate. They want to keep finding short-term rentals and they want to keep finding whatever it happens to be, and they also attract more money because their friends and their family know that they’ve been doing a good job at it.

You’ve been teaching about syndication for. For years. Uh, actually I think that was the first conference that I ever went to, uh, of yours years ago. It must have been over a decade ago, but can you tell us a little bit more about syndication in the real estate world? 

Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s such a great tool. If you go around any town, you look at all the big stuff, the retail and the buildings and the hotels, very, very rarely is that owned by one gal or one guy.

Usually it’s a group of people that invest together, and the fancy word for that is syndication. So syndication is a way for people to pool their resources. Some bring the deal, some bring management, some bring expertise, some bring capital, some bring the ability to qualify, and you put that all together and.

Everyone [00:23:00] achieves more. So it’s not really that mysterious, but because you are raising capital from other people, it brings up two primary uh, issues. One is technical. That is its securities law in most countries that you now have to deal with, and that’s completely manageable. Um, but it is something you have to learn about.

And the other is just your mindset about. Taking other people’s money. And so you have to get over both those things. And I think if you have any trepidation about investing somebody else’s money in your deal, then you could be an excellent candidate. If you go, oh, no, line up and just write the checks, you’re probably not the person we need.

Because when you raise capital, is that a sacred thing? This is other people’s living below their means and putting their production in the form of an investment capital that then. Can go into your project and it works like this. I might be very interested in the idea of short-term rentals and [00:24:00] why not?

I can make better income. I can have fabulous properties in wonderful parts of the world, but there’s so much to learn in which marketplace and who’s gonna clean it, and how do I get the keys to people and all the stuff that you obviously know and most of your listeners know, but I might want to get exposure to short-term rentals by saying, could I put some money in a deal?

And on the other side, if you’re that person that you talked about where, man, I, I bought all the, the units I can until I either make more money or until these properties are worth more and I can refinance and get some more capital out of ’em, well then if you had more money, could you do more deals, is the question we ask people.

If you already are in a niche or a marketplace or you’re already. Doing the thing in real estate, if you could have more capital, could you do good deals that made return, if so, than you’re a candidate for syndication? So it’s, it’s on both sides. The passive person, this is a way I invest into sectors and markets that I have no knowledge of.

I, I, I have a premise that you can only know [00:25:00] about a half a dozen markets well enough to make a well-informed investment decision, but there’s more markets than that. So if I want exposure to a market type or to a geographic market, or a demographic market, and I don’t have the expertise or the experience myself, then I find someone who has that expertise and experience that I can invest passively with.

So if you’re a short term, uh, rental investor and you’re thinking, man, I could do a lot more if I had more capital. I will tell you there are way more people with money. Then there are people willing to learn and get up every day and do the hard work and find the markets and get management. There’s a lot fewer of those folks.

There is money everywhere and every day we print print billions more. So there’s no lack of capital at first. It seems like there is no, uh, where am I gonna get money? Well, there’s just money everywhere. So syndication is the tool most people use when they hit that hurdle that you talked about. I’ve run out of either my own capital.

Or my own [00:26:00] ability to qualify. I’m Fanny and freddi out. I have all the loans that I can get without, you know, having to put 40% down and paying 11% of interest. Okay, well then syndication is your next option rather than you having to supply all the money. You bring people along, and that’s a fascinating world.

It’s, it’s kind of the place that people can really start to scale. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely. Um, do you mind, uh, talking about, uh, some of your experience in the hospitality sector and, and maybe how syndication has helped you through, through that? 

Speaker 3: Yeah, so early on, you know, I was always enamored. By, uh, nicer properties.

I cut my teeth on C class apartments. I was an onsite residential manager of a four eight unit apartment building a block from where I went to school. And, uh, learned a ton sitting behind that desk. And, uh, before I knew it, I had amassed quite the, uh, expertise. Tenant landlord law in the [00:27:00] fabulous state of California.

So much so that one of the first real estate guys events that I taught was called Landlord Bootcamp. And the whole premise was, you know, you buy a toaster, you get an operating manual, you buy a rental house, you don’t get nothing. And so we designed a one day course that was the a’s a to Z on what it takes to manage a property, not be a manager, but to be the owner, the asset manager.

If you will, okay, I wanna buy a rental house for all the reasons, but how do I take care of it and who do I have help and all that. And so we did this, this course, and, uh, I would get the most joy out of the afternoon. It was open q and a and uh, uh, the first time we did it and people were asked, well, how much notice?

And all the que, all the technical questions people have about renting, especially in a place like California very. Tenant friendly place. Mm-hmm. And I just knew all the answers and I knew the answers from not head knowledge. ’cause I, I read the manual, but Seat Knowledge, having been in that chair in that office for five years, hands-on managing and I went, wow, I [00:28:00] really do know this stuff.

We were doing a, an event once in, a guy asked me a question, I don’t know, 30 minutes in the q and a and I went. You know, I don’t think I know the answer to that. That’s a, that’s a good question. I, I have someone I can probably, you know, get the answer from, but I, I, I just didn’t know, and so two things happened.

One, uh, Paul, who you know, is in the back of the room running the sound, he goes, I don’t think I’ve ever heard you not know the answer to a tenant, landlord law question. But the second thing is that at the cocktail reception that night, the guy comes up, he goes, you know, you won me over the minute. You didn’t have the answer to my question.

Because every other question, you seem to know the answer of about this guy’s either making it up or it’s too good to be true. And so I tried to come up with a hard question. I go, well, you did. And he goes, but the minute you, you didn’t know the answer, you gained credibility. So that’s a great mindset that you don’t have to know every answer.

You have to know somebody that does. And so that led me on this long journey, which I won’t bore you with, but I did end up with some properties that were. Um, nightly and [00:29:00] weekly rental properties long before there was any such thing as Airbnb. These were properties in Cabo San Lucas, a market that I had learned about and liked, and that just turns out that a house that would rent for $1,200 a month would get $300 a night.

So there was a local manager there that, because it was a resort market, they had a few of these rentals, but not a ton. Uh, but I just got enamored by that whole model until I realized just how much management is involved. And so that led us on a, a search of looking for different markets that made sense and we ended up, uh, in a hospitality market, not because we, we chose to.

I always let the market tell me what it needs. So rather than pigeonhole myself as a single family investor or an apartment investor, or an office investor, I go and look for a need in a marketplace and especially an unmet need and see what is it that the market needs. And so several times that answer has been a product I’m familiar [00:30:00] with, but one of those times we found a market that had a ton of promise and potential.

This was, uh, about 18 years ago. And, uh, in hindsight. It was a market with a lot of promise and potential, and we look really smart for picking it 18 years ago, but it was as much luck as anything else. Uh, and yet what was missing was overnight rentals. There weren’t enough hotels. No one had been a hotel in this beautiful tourist market.

No one had built a hotel in 16 years. Well, how can that be? Well, because what people were building was condominium developments, and they would sell the condominiums and then run it as a hotel. Which is a valid methodology. The challenge is the market desperately needed hotels for single and couple travelers.

That’s what they needed. And everyone was building three bedroom, two bathroom condos with big kitchens and refrigerators. And the average person would stay there for a week and they put beer in the refrigerator and they’d reheat something in the microwave. And that’s about all they’d use the kitchen for [00:31:00] because they.

Came mm-hmm. To a destination where there’s stuff to do and they were out on boats and swimming and all the things not cooking. So I recognized that there was need, a need for an actual hotel. Yet I didn’t know anything about the hotel business except I spent a hundred nights a year in a hotel. So I, I started to delve into it.

And, uh, that has led us to having a branded hotel, uh, the biggest hotel by room count in the country. Um, not where we expected to be. But it’s another lesson, and that is that life takes you on these journeys and if you’ll pay attention, sometimes there are clues there. Instead of approaching it with, I know the answer, approach it with, I just need to ask the right questions.

What does this market need? Like, you know this, Tim, probably better than most short-term rentals don’t work well equally in every marketplace. Surprisingly, there’s a few markets that you wouldn’t think of as short-term rentals where they actually perform really well, and there’s some other markets that you would think, well, that’s an obvious place to have [00:32:00] short-term rentals, and it doesn’t work very well.

So it’s not about coming to the market with your idea of what you want to do. It’s let the market speak to you. 

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, that, that’s great points. Filling the demand, you know, truly understanding, you know, in, in your, your case, what the guest was looking for. They weren’t looking for a kitchen, they were looking for a, a vacation.

Uh, and yeah, that’s, that’s certainly really, really true and the short term rental world, and I think very often overlooked. Um. You know, part of part of what gives us these insights, I guess, is just our network. You know what I mean? Knowing people in different places, knowing people in different industries and sectors.

And Robert, I gotta say, you probably have one of the biggest networks in the real estate industry from, you know, outta everyone that I know. Uh, and so that creates a lot of opportunities as well. We’ve got just a couple quick minutes left. You do a ton [00:33:00] of different seminars throughout the year. Maybe you could just touch on networking really quick and uh, and then we can close with some ways for people to make sure they can find you and find your content.

Speaker 3: Awesome. So I love going to events whether I’m asked to speak or whether it’s our event or whether I’m the master of ceremonies. I love going to events ’cause that’s where people are. And networking is not something to be dismissed lightly, nor is it handing out your business cards to every person you see.

I would rather meet the five right people at an event than meet 500 people at an event. And this took me a while to figure out. It’s like, well, isn’t it just a numbers game? Well it is, but not in the way you think. So when you are going to be with people of a like mind of any kind, whether it’s industry or whatever it is, you wanna be intentional about what, what you’re after.

What do I need? What’s missing? Or where could I add value? And how do I find that person? And if you think about who the [00:34:00] ideal match would be for you, and that could be a thousand things, but you know what that is, and you’re aware, then you will find it when you walk in the room. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, then you don’t know.

Now, that’s almost opposite advice to what I just said about markets. Let the market tell me what it needs. But my friend Robert Kiyosaki taught me one of the most interesting things I’ve ever learned, and that is he never walks on stage with a preconceived notion of what he is gonna talk about. He lets the room tell him what it needs.

Which sounds really weird. When he first explained that to me, I’m like, how do you let the room tell you? But now that I watch him and we’ve been friends for a quarter of a century, I, I watch him do, he just did this for us at an event. I, I know better to even ask him what he’s gonna talk about, nor do I give a, a, a topic that he’s gonna cover.

’cause he’s gonna let the room tell him. And it was extraordinary. And I’ve seen Robert speak so many times, as have [00:35:00] you, and it was one of the most awesome talks I’ve ever heard him give because he was just cognizant of who was in the room and what they wanted to hear. And so I think when you are networking with somebody, you need to have a system to be able to, because here’s what happens.

We meet, we have a good conversation. We exchange business cards. That might be the end of it, but it shouldn’t be the end of it. If we had a good connection. I used to watch my dad and my dad would ask for your business card, and then right in front of your face, he would pick up the business card and he’d be taking notes on the back of your card, right?

You probably saw him do this and he would say, oh, oh, tell me about that. And then he, if, if they anybody said anything, he goes, well, I, I, I don’t wanna trust my memory. Which says, this is important to me. And they, they never see anybody do that. And he would do that. And then he did the most extraordinary thing.

He would get back home or back to the office, and the next week he’d start making notes. And he would send off of an email or send someone a card or, right. He would follow up with people. And that’s the key. Yeah. So you’re not [00:36:00] gonna follow up with three dozen people. Or you’re, if you do, it’s gonna be some terrible impersonal email.

Rather find the two or three best prospects, whatever it is you’re looking for, and then make it a connection and, and my favorite place to do that is at live events, which is why at our live events, we always have a forum for people to interact and exchange ideas, information, and, and contacts. But be intentional when it comes to networking.

It’s not a numbers game like you think it is. How many of the right people can I meet, not just. How many people can I meet? 

Speaker 2: Yeah, be intentional. I love it. And every year you do a, a seminar called, uh, create Your Future, which is really being intentional with your life. Uh, maybe we can wrap up real quick, Robert, with just the best way where people can find you.

And if you have a second to tell us about the event, we’d love to hear about that as well. 

Speaker 3: It is like no other event I think anyone does. It’s crazy amazing. It’s the highest storm we do. It’s called Create Your Future, the 2026 goals retreat. [00:37:00] Uh, it happens the middle of January in Colorado Springs this year.

Uh, but it is all about figuring out what you want to do when you grow up. Most of us end up somewhere in life. We made a series of decisions that brought us to where we are and some of those have been great decisions and they’ve led us to mastery and they’ve led us to great investments and sometimes not.

And so the sooner you can really, really get clear. And focused the better. And that’s what this event’s designed to do. If you’re struggling at all with the direction of your life or your finances or your health or your relationships, any of that, this is not a realestate event. It’s a holistic look at you and the rest of your life.

Mm-hmm. Then, uh, check it out. You can go to goals retreat.com to find out about Create Your Future or go to the real estate guys. Our website is realestate guys radio.com. There’s a button that says Events Now, don’t get overwhelmed ’cause you’re gonna see a lot of events. Those are generally events that [00:38:00] I am invited to speak at, but you’ll also see the events that we do twice a year.

We do the Secrets of Successful Syndication, hard to say, but a two day workshop when I’m figuring out how to put those bigger deals together with other people’s money, uh, we do our annual Investor Summit, which is the crews. Uh, it’s a ton of fun. Mm-hmm. Uh, you’ll find that on the site. And then we do a, a few other events, uh, depending on, uh, what time of the year it is.

But, uh, come on out to Real Estate Guys event. You’ll get to meet cool people like Tim and you’ll get to, uh, network strategically. 

Speaker 2: Yeah. Thank you so much Robert. I know you could have talked about a million different things today. Uh, absolute pleasure having you on. If you’re out there and if you have not listened to the Real Estate Guys radio, subscribe, it is a wealth of knowledge.

Until next time, Robert, we hope to have you back on in the future and thanks again for coming on. 

Speaker 3: Thanks, Tim. Appreciate it.

A brand new bill just changed everything for short-term rental investors. If you’re thinking about launching or expanding your Airbnb portfolio, there has never been a better time. In this episode, we break down how the permanent return of a hundred percent bonus depreciation can dramatically lower your tax bill legally, and no matter what industry.

You are earning your money from. I just love real estate. It is by far the most tax favored asset you could park your money in. Stay tuned as we jump into another episode on the short term Rental Riches podcast.

Well here we go, a hundred percent bonus Depreciation is back The big, beautiful bill. Has passed. And as a real estate investor, we have a lot of opportunity. What a great name to the big, beautiful bill. It truly is beautiful And so what does this mean? I’m gonna break this down really [00:01:00] quickly and then we’ll get into the details. But the benefit is that you can buy a property and potentially deduct 20 to 25%. Of that whole purchase price against your income.

Now, I’ve done this a whole bunch of times with my real estate portfolio. If you’re new to the channel, we’ll welcome. I’ve been investing for over 15 years, and I own property in multiple countries and multiple states within the us So this is of course, just for US citizens.

But the good news is it’s quite an easy process, so let’s go ahead and jump into it. It basically says if you buy a short-term rental that.

has an average reservation length of seven days or less, well then it’s considered inactive business. And the rules around inactive business versus a passive real estate investment are different. 

 Most people are calling this the STR. Tax loophole. Uh, and it’s not a loophole in illegal sense. This is completely legal, but you gotta [00:02:00] follow the rules.

So basically what it says is if you buy a short-term rental and you operate that short-term rental with an average reservation length of seven days or less, and you materially participate, well then you can use the depreciation expense from that short term rental to offset your other income.

So what does it mean to materially participate? Well, there’s actually seven different ways that you could qualify, but the two most common are a hundred hour rule and a 500 hour rule. The 500 hour rule says if you buy a short-term rental and you spend 500 hours on it throughout that year, then you are now materially participating.

The second rule says if you spend a hundred hours on that property, but no one else spends more time on it than you, so not a manager, not a housekeeper, then you materially participate. You can do the bonus depreciation cost EG study, which we’re gonna talk about in a second, and then you can use all that [00:03:00] expense to offset your other income.

So now of course, traditional short-term rental property management is not gonna allow you to qualify for this legally, right? Because they very often own your listing. They take full control. It doesn’t mean that you can’t qualify, but it does make it a lot harder. Before we dive in further, I just want to make you aware that I am not a CPA, but we have had some great CPAs on this channel. If you go back to episode 1 56 and 1 57, you’ll find our interviews with Tom Wheelwright. He is the accountant for Robert Kiyosaki, or many of you probably know through his book, rich Dad, poor Dad, and he talks about how you should be partnering with the government.

So great episode, and anything that I talk about today, you’ll of course want to check with your accountant.

So two main ways to qualify to materially participate. You’ve got the 500 hour [00:04:00] option, or you have the a hundred hour option where you spend a hundred hours on the property. This could, of course, be setting it up, furnishing it, getting it ready, hiring your housekeepers, getting everything aligned, and then you could get help from someone else to help you partner it.

And we would of course love to partner with you on that property. We’ve been doing this in dozens of cities across the United States and across multiple countries where we will take over the full operation for you, but you still own your account listings and it makes it easier for you to qualify for some of these tax loopholes.

Now the amount of depreciation expense that you can use to offset your other income is determined by what they call a cost segregation study. It’s an actual study of your property breaking down all of the different components.

This could be anything from the actual structure of your property, furniture, appliances, the roof, the plumbing systems [00:05:00] improvements, and it even goes as far as your landscaping. , when I saw this on a prior cost segregation study for one of my properties, I was truly blown away.

But landscaping can be an improvement, right? If you put a whole bunch of money into landscaping, it doesn’t last forever, and that’s really what this depreciation expense. Is doing. It’s basically saying, Hey, you own this property and it’s deteriorating over time, and because of that, the US government is going to give you an expense.

And so we like to call it a ghost expense because you’re not actually paying for this, you’re not taking this money out of your pocket. And the ironic thing is that even though they give us an expense in terms of depreciation, we know that the values of our properties. Are usually just going up and up.

Of course, that depends on which market you’re in, right?

So that’s what depreciation is in a nutshell. And now normal depreciation usually happens over a schedule. It has a lifetime, so different [00:06:00] things will deteriorate or be expensed over a schedule. Appliances, for example, aren’t going to last as long as a roof, and so any of the components of your property may have a schedule between five.

To even 39 years. But what bonus depreciation allows you to do is to do this study, break everything down, and then take all of that expense in year one.

Now, you can’t do this yourself. You do have to have a professional help you with the study. The good news is. As this tax law has become more and more popular, more and more people are taking advantage of it. I hope you will too. There’s lots more companies that can help you with the cost segregation study.

I used to pay thousands of dollars back in the day for these studies, but now there’s a lot more affordable ones. Meaning if the purchase price of your property was lower. And the cost segregation study is a lot lower, then it can still make a lot of sense for you no matter the value of the property. I [00:07:00] got a couple names for you.

 I’m just gonna read these off. These are well-known cost segregation study companies. The first one is U-S-T-A-G-I check ’em out. We’ll make sure we’ve got all the links in the show notes.

The second one is engineered tax services, and the third one is c. SI, so there’s new ones popping up all the time. Again, make sure that you plan all this out with your accountant beforehand as well. You really do need a plan, and I’ll break down those action steps at the end of the episode today.

Make sure you do your research. Make sure you get multiple bids. The actual study itself isn’t going to take that much time.

Okay, so we’ve got a general idea what bonus depreciation is. We’ve got some companies to help us do this. Does it make sense for you to find a property to qualify for bonus depreciation? Well, that really depends on how much income tax you are paying. It also depends on how much time you have. Remember, you do [00:08:00] have to have an upfront time commitment.

Now, I said upfront because you don’t have to be managing that property in years, 2, 3, 4, or five based on the way the rules are written today. You just need to qualify in the first year.

One of the beautiful things for you, high income earners out there, first of all, you have more money to invest in real estate, but you can also carry those losses forward.

So let’s say you went out and bought a $5 million property. You went through the cost segregation study, you made sure that you materially participate, and maybe now you have potentially a million dollars of bonus depreciation to use to offset your income. Well, it doesn’t mean you have to use it all in year one, and that’s the beautiful thing.

You can carry that loss forward. So let’s say you had $300,000 in income tax. You can use that to write off a whole big chunk, but then you have $700,000 left over for the next year and the following year until you’ve used it all [00:09:00] up.

So the real quick action plan, decide if this actually makes sense for you. Talk it over with your CPA, decide if you have this upfront time to invest. And now remember, it could be a married couple, and so if you are filing jointly and one of you is making a lot of money. But you file jointly. Well then the spouse can spend time on the short term rental and you could still qualify.

Remember, double check with your accountant.

Next step, find yourself a property. And I gotta say, today’s market, I think’s not a bad time to be shopping around prices have softened and it is definitely a buyer’s market, so you can negotiate your way through a lot of good deals.

Okay. One other thing to keep in mind, if you’re going for the a hundred hour rule, you may consider buying a property in the second half of the year where you are going to spend more time setting up the property, and then later you have a manager take it over after you’ve qualified.

So really all this just comes down to planning. [00:10:00] Actually qualifying and taking bonus depreciation is really quite easy and straightforward.

One last thing to consider is that if you do go through the process, and you decide to sell this property that you took bonus depreciation on in the future. Well, there will be some tax consequences.

You of course may have a capital gains tax, so that’s gonna be the difference in value from the property. The price that you paid versus what you sold it for. Let’s say it was a million dollars and you sold it for 1.5. Well, you have $500,000 in capital gains tax, which is a lower tax. It’s lower than your income tax, but you could also have depreciation recapture, which is another tax on that depreciation that you took, and it can be up to 25%.

And one of the other amazing rules in the real estate world tax benefits is a 10 31 exchange. So just because you sell this property in the future doesn’t mean you need to pay those taxes. As long as you’re rolling that [00:11:00] investment into a new investment, you can defer those taxes and you can defer the amount that you save from the depreciation.

So I hope you found that helpful, and if you’ve been on the sidelines for a while and you haven’t pulled the trigger yet on a short term rental, and you’re also earning a lot, and paying a lot in income tax, well, this is just an incredible opportunity.

Make sure you check with your accountant. Until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week. 

If you are struggling to keep your vacation rental or your short-term rental occupied, well, you might think that slashing prices will solve the problem, but there’s several situations where cutting your prices will only hurt you.

In fact, we see hosts losing thousands of dollars every month because they’re cutting the rates at the wrong time or when they don’t need to. So today we’re diving into when not to lower your prices. I’m gonna walk you through four specific scenarios.

Where price cuts just won’t help, and they will only lower your revenue potential, and more importantly, what you should be doing instead. Let’s jump right in and welcome back to the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast.

 the first scenario when you should not be lowering your prices is when the rest of your market is charging more for a very similar property.

So same size, same. Amen. Same location, and they are staying occupied. So if they’re charging more same property and they’re staying occupied, then lowering your prices further and further is not going to help because you already have [00:01:00] proof that the market is booking at these rates. 

So what you need to do instead is really compare your property to the ones that are already getting booked. See if there’s something missing there. Maybe you got some bad reviews recently.

We know that bad reviews can really tank your visibility, which is another reason why you should always be on all the OTAs, all the different listing platforms, and also another reason why your guest experience should be top notch to void that in the first place. But the reality is, is if you’re in a market with a lot of data and the rest of your market’s staying booked at higher prices, and we’re not talking just a few dollars higher, but if they’re significantly higher, you know, let’s say 10% or even more, and they’re staying booked and occupied, then there’s something else going on with your property.

You’re gonna want to check out your visibility on the different listing platforms. See if you can identify when that visibility dropped off.

 The second scenario when lowering your prices is very likely not going to help you, is when your market occupancy is very, very low, [00:02:00] and the expected occupancy is very low.

So maybe your property’s in a seasonal area where it just hardly gets booked in the winter. For example, let’s say the market occupancy is like 5%. In other words, five out of every hundred properties in that market are getting booked, and so the chances are not that high. Now, let’s imagine that there’s already five properties booked in that market, 

And the average occupancy has been historically 5%. Well, you could drop your prices further and further and further, but the chances are unfortunately, you’re very likely not going to be getting booked. Lowering your prices does not create more demand in the market.

And so this might seem like maybe a tricky thing to look up, but it’s really, really easy. So if you’re using a pricing tool, dynamic pricing tool, our team uses Price Labs. You can go to the section that’s called Neighborhood Data. You can [00:03:00] scroll down just a little bit. You can click a box

For those of you catching the YouTube version, while I’ll show this on the screen,

it’s really simple. It’s basically neighborhood data. You can see the historic market occupancy and rates. 

So if you have a brand new property and you’re expecting it to stay booked and you’re just scratching your head and you’ve lowered your prices and you don’t know what’s going on, we’ll check out this neighborhood data. And it could be that just no one in your market is really getting booked because of seasonality or whatever it happens to be.

The third scenario for when you should not be lowering your short-term rental prices is when you’re well ahead of your booking window.

Throughout the year, your property has a booking window. Now it’s not one single booking window. It can change based on seasonality. It says basically the amount of time someone reserves your property before check-in. So let’s say you’re in a market and the average booking window is 120 days. Well, if you’re 150 days out and you’re [00:04:00] scratching your head and you’re like, why is my property not booked?

And you start to lower your prices, you are lowering them far too soon.

So again, you’re going to need a dynamic pricing tool to check out this information, but it’s really easy to come up with and then you’re gonna wanna take it one step further. So you’re gonna wanna look at the days or the events or the. Peaks in the year where the demand was higher, because very likely what will happen is that booking window will get longer.

So if someone wants to book your property for Thanksgiving, because it’s in the ideal place to eat that delicious Turkey and celebrate with your family, well, then they’re going to wanna reserve it. Earlier, and so maybe that 120 days becomes 150. So again, you’ve gotta monitor this and make sure that if you’re 180 days out and you’re like, why has no one booked my property for Thanksgiving?

And you start lowering your prices, you’re lowering them too soon.

Now, of course this does depend a little bit on your risk level. If [00:05:00] you just want to get a booking in and you’re okay at those lower rates, then lowering your rates is gonna be more attractive and your property will get booked sooner. But if your risk level is moderate, you could say, then I would wait until you’re in that prime booking window, and if you’ve passed the booking window and you still haven’t got booked, well then that’s the time to start dropping those rates.

Okay, the fourth scenario when dropping your rates is not going to be that helpful, and that is when your properties already staying really well booked and you’re still within your booking windows. So let’s say you’re at 80% occupancy, and when you’re at 80% occupancy, you have some rules set up to automatically start discounting your property to fill those remaining gaps.

Well, if you’re in your booking window and there’s still demand in the market, then you’re just giving money away, right? You wanna hold out for that booking window. Keep your rates competitive, of course, and [00:06:00] ideally, as long as you have really good reviews, you could expect to fill that remaining occupancy as long as there’s more expected occupancy to come in the market.

So real quick, expected occupancy. If you wanted to look at July for any given year, you could do this with your dynamic pricing tool, and you could see that the market usually ends that month at 80% occupancy. If you’re at 70% and you’re in June, well then you could expect there’s 10 more percent of occupancy to fill.

You can use that same neighborhood data available in Price Labs or whichever pricing tool that you use to see those occupancy levels. So I know these things get a little more detailed, but they really are very simple.

You can check out these pricing tools, check out any of our prior episodes. We talk about a lot of these things. You can go to sdr riches.com. You can see all of our prior episodes. We also have a ton of free guides and resources for you there. And of course, if you don’t want to [00:07:00] do this yourself and you’re scratching your head and you’re lowering your property’s prices and you’re still not getting booked.

We would love to help you out with it.

Attr riches.com. You’ll see a little partner with us button in our team. Would love to chat with you. Learn more about your property. . Well, I know I said four scenarios, but I actually have a fifth one here, so this is gonna be a bonus one for any of you out there that have a truly unique property that doesn’t have a comparable comp set. What do I mean? There’s not other properties similar to yours where you can use market data to help base your decisions.

Maybe you have some sort of historic property that’s truly one of a kind. Maybe you have a property that’s really large and it hosts like 30 people, but no one else in your market has that property. Well, then you don’t have a lot of comparable data, and so your pricing strategy is gonna be based off historic performance.

That’s always helpful if you have it. If not, then it’s really a [00:08:00] testing scenario, right? And you have to watch things very closely.

If you’ve booked that property in the past, it sleeps 30 people for 20 grand for a weekend. Well, even though historic data doesn’t predict the future, you do know that people are out there willing to pay those prices. Of course, the lower the prices. For something, the more value people often perceive.

 if it’s a brand new property and you don’t have any historic performance or any historic data, well then you really just have to test things out.

Operating your short-term rental like a pro is really understanding your market. Or your guests. So if you have that unique property, you know what types of guests are going to be staying there, that’s gonna help you with your pricing decisions. But in a nutshell, it comes down to supply and demand, the fundamentals of economics.

So there you go. There are five reasons where lowering your prices might not be necessary at all, might be hurting you, cutting your revenue potential.

If you are finding these episodes helpful, [00:09:00] I’d really appreciate a thumbs up, a like please comment if there’s something else you would like us to talk about or something that I’ve been leaving out. And if you’re tuning into the audio version, if you haven’t yet, I’d really appreciate.

Uh, just a quick review on Apple or Spotify or wherever you’ve been tuning in. Till next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.