Welcome to Short-Term Rental Riches. We’ll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short-term rentals, quick actionable items to acquire, manage, and scale your portfolio. I’m your host, Tim Hubbard.

A lot’s happened in the short-term rental industry over the last decade, and one of the things that we’ve discovered is that you don’t need a normal house to make a lot of money as a short-term rental. In fact, a lot of the more unique properties, whether it’s a cabin or a submarine that Airbnb loves to promote, those a lot of times make much more than the traditional homes.

I’m really excited for our guest today. This isn’t the first time on the show. He was with us over a year ago. Dave Zuck. He’s one of the founders of Zuck Cabins. They’ve been building some really amazing properties, different variations, unique styles that can be used as short-term rentals, but there’s a ton of flexibility with them.

They’ve sold millions and millions of dollars of ’em. They can send ’em around the us. So excited to dive into the details again with Dave Zuck. Welcome back to the show. Hey Tim, thanks for having me back on your show. Good to see you. It’s good to see you as well. And for those of you that did not catch the first episode, Dave has a truly admirable background.

I mean, this isn’t his first business. He’s done lots and lots of things. Lots of things in the real estate world. From multifamily to commercial assets. Just Dave, you want to give just another quick recap, maybe the 62nd background? Yeah. I grew up in modular manufacturing, so my dad, I. Had a storage shed business and we built storage sheds that morphed into bigger garages, modular garages, and then later into modular cabins.

I think, uh, it was 2006, I believe. When we founded Souk Cabins, we started building modular cabins. Today we ship modular cabins and park models and a DU units all over the country. I think just about every state. We shipped hundreds of units across the country. Just last year alone, as we got into this space, we realized that there was a niche.

Yeah, we service RV parks and campgrounds and individual owners, second, third home owners, home buyers. But we also get into the short-term rental space a lot. And we have a lot of short-term rental owners, uh, people that come back to us again and again. And of course we eat our own cooking. We do a lot of the short-term rental space.

Uh, we we’re deep into the short-term rental space as well, and I have short-term rentals in, I believe, I don’t know, seven or eight different states now, but I grew up in the space. I ventured into several different asset classes, multifamily self storage, most recently car washes, building Tommy’s express car, but never stray too far away from the.

This business, this short-term rentals business fits right in with what we’re doing. And I love the space. We’ve got many short-term rental homes ourself. My son is involved, my daughter’s involved, you know, our family’s involved. It’s a fun business to be involved in it. You know what I find interesting, Tim is not too long ago, we just talked about this recently, like I bet 10 years ago, the thought that you could own a highly desirable piece of property on the water.

The river, the bay, the ocean, whatever, and have that thing, not just be a giant hole in your pocket. Have that thing actually. Mm-hmm. Cash flow. That was sort of a, a foreign concept back there. Normally, if you owned a property like that, it was liability. It was, it was something that you used and, you know, of course you could supplement a little bit with some rental income from family and friends and maybe an agency or something like that.

Today with short-term rental, with the platforms and the technology out there. It’s a different story and I love it. It is. It’s a reality. I sort of joked before we jump on the podcast that if you could have shipped them all the way down into Columbia, we would’ve loved to put ’em on our lot down there where we’re developing.

’cause what you guys are building, Dave, are really, really cool. I mean, just since last year when we had you on seeing all the models and I was out there in person. Over a year ago there in Pennsylvania where you guys have your factory and it was awesome. You guys have a machine there knocking out some really, really good quality stuff.

And just since then, I mean jumping on your website and seeing all the new models, it’s exciting. It is a fun space and it’s a reality that that people can have properties on the water, like you said, and also have a really good. ROI. I think that’s what most of us as investors are looking for at the end of the day.

And now, not to say people couldn’t have really good use for your properties for personal use, but we find a lot of times in the short term rental space, people have vacation rentals that they use a little bit on their own. And then sometimes it starts doing so well that they just turn it into a hundred percent.

Investment. Can you talk a little bit just about the ROI numbers? ’cause I know you have a lot of short-term rentals yourself, and obviously you practice what you preach. You build these, and so you’ve installed a lot of these on some of your own properties. Can you talk just a little bit about the ROIs?

Yeah. I kind of fell into this space. I don’t know. I mean, I was aware of this space. One of our friends came to us and said, Hey, I’m getting into this short-term rental management space. Gimme something to manage and you know, a young kid and I’m like, I don’t really have anything, you know, I got multifamily apartment buildings, I, you know, whatever.

I don’t, I don’t have anything for you right now. But he kept coming back to me and I know you got real estate, you got stuff, got stuff going on. Just gimme something, anything. So I got with my brother and at the time we had a cabin in South Central Pennsylvania up in the mountains and there was nothing around, like, there’s no river, there’s no lake, there’s no tourist detraction.

It’s just a cabin out, 300 acres out in the middle of nowhere. So we sort of laughed about it. We’re like, yeah, let’s give him that thing. And it was just a family compound that we would go to on 4th of July and we would hunt out of it. We’d use it a number of times a year, but most of the time it’s about there empty.

So we sort of jokingly, we were like, oh yeah, let’s give him that thing. Uh, that’ll get him off our backs for a little while. So we gave him the cabin. We did a little, we did, you know, it was brand new, what we felt like was short term runoff friendly. We added a few features to it and gave it to him and, and all of a sudden it was like a month in and we.

Whoa, wait a minute. Well, we gotta block out hunting season. I mean, this guy just took off. I mean, this thing was renting for 800,000 bucks a night and he was booking out the calendar and I was like, okay, well wait a minute. We want to use this thing. And in hunting season, we had to scrambled around, scramble around, and kind of block out some time that we wanted to use it.

So it was an eyeopener for us, and that’s what got us into the space we’re like. Hey, if this works up there, I guarantee you it’s gonna work even better, maybe some other places. So we bought a place on the river and kind of just went down that path and watched the concept play out and we really liked what we were seeing and we just, we just kept right on doing it.

In terms of ROI, yeah, I think the biggest home we have, I think sleeps like 25. And those numbers can work. Those numbers can really work. And it also. Whatever we say, I’m sure you would agree with Tim. Different areas, different places demand different stuff, different homes, different square footages, four bedrooms, less bedroom, whatever.

So you just gotta play around with geographically what’s needed in that area. But generally what we’ve found is smaller square footage gets us more ROIs. So we started mm-hmm. Like compacting, like how small can we go here and. People still will come and pay a premium. So if you look on our website, so cabins.com and you go onto the park model section, those are 400 square feet and there’s people, clients of ours, some of our own, we’re getting 3, 4, 5, 500 $50 per night to to stay in a couple hundred square feet, little cap.

Now it’s nice, these people aren’t, it’s small square footage unit with tag of. Just over a hundred thousand dollars and mm-hmm. And you can command premium on that small square footage footprint. It’s pretty amazing. Yeah. That is amazing. I mean, people are, they love experiences, right? That’s especially some of the younger generations.

And one of the awesome things about having an investment that you know is maybe somewhere over a little over a hundred thousand. I know you guys have a big range of prices with all your different products, but. If the entry level price is lower and you can put this property out next to the river somewhere where there is an infrastructure because it’s already pre-built.

I’ll let you get into this a little bit more, Dave, but just to hit on the fact that the ROI can be so much higher because you don’t have to build the thing and to try to build a property out in some area that’s completely remote without infrastructure that’s not only expensive, but it’s really difficult.

And so you guys have managed to. Just remove that challenge for someone that has a good place to put one of these things. Can you talk a little bit, I know you’re kind of at the top and you guys have a big team handling all the details and all that, but maybe just sort of a high level view of the types of models and how they come, they come furnished and how you can deliver ’em.

Can you talk a little bit about what’s available? One of the things that we figured out, it’s much more efficient to take the work to the workforce. You find a community where the, the workforce is really strong, and then you bring the work to that workforce and you know, you’ve been here to Lancaster County.

Lancaster County is full of entrepreneurs and builders and people that work with their hands in the Amish community and they build really good quality stuff. There’s communities like that scattered throughout the United States, and we have several of ’em set up with shops, manufacturing facilities, and manufacture where we manufacture our products.

But when you are out in the middle of nowhere, or even, let’s say you’re in New York or Colorado, the northeast or heavy populated areas, one of the biggest challenges in the construction industry is the workforce. So it’s very inefficient. I think the last I looked, the average contractor was in his late fifties, early sixties.

Mm-hmm. That’s sort of a problem. So being able to take the inefficiency out. And add a layer of efficiency in there by bringing the work to the workforce and then shipping that product out as a, as a finished unit or almost finished unit. Some of our modular products, we gotta send a crew out to button everything up after we get it on property, but really what the more work you can do on site at the factory in the middle of a, where the workers are in the middle of the workforce.

If you went to. Whatever the outskirts of New York City and you try to put a team of modular workers together in a shop, that would be challenging. Challenging enough, right? Right. In the heart of. We’ve figured out a way how to take the inefficiencies out of it and really build a really good product and be able to ship it all over the country, and it makes sense for a lot of investors.

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So it makes it much easier for the ambassador for all the things you just said, but correct me if I’m wrong, but you guys also ship some of these furnished Oh yeah. Yeah. They are furnished. We’ll ship ’em across the country. We have a small team of people who furnish them for us. They’ll put all the mm-hmm.

Furniture together and ship everything with the unit. So, yeah, it’s designed to where, let’s say you are a short-term rental owner or a small boutique resort owner or something like that. We’ll come out there, we’ll bring the units to you. We’ll build the decks and the porches and furnish the units inside and out.

And it can be, of course, there’s some few infrastructure things need to be done on site. But other than that, we’ll build you a unit that’s pretty much moving. Ready? Yeah. That’s awesome. I know last time you were on, we talked a lot more in detail about some of the financial benefits of, uh, purchasing a property or investment like this.

And depending on the model, you guys have really branched out and you, and you’re, you’ve got a whole bunch of different models these days. But we talked more specifically last time about the park model homes and some of the unique benefits of being a park model home. Some being no property tax, potentially bonus depreciation, potentially the ability to possibly get financing.

Can you talk a little bit about those pieces? Yeah. There’s lots to like about it from just a kind of a lot of different avenues and the, you hit on a couple of them. If you’re a licensed, that’s. Just like a travel trailer, you pull behind your pickup truck. It’s licensed. It’s portable, so there’s real estate.

Put this places where it may not be legal to let’s go, you know, put a footer in it, put a module we’re building in. So there’s different units that we build work for different places or different uses or for different people. But there’s a lot of advantages to these park models and taxes, usability of, of putting them on the property.

If you need to, you could put ’em on their for seasonal use and pull ’em off the property when you’re not using them. So ease of use, getting ’em in there on wheels, setting them up, getting ’em ready for your short-term rental guests. Mm-hmm. Low cost licensing’s, generally pretty easy. There’s, you know, the financing is different than, say if you were to go with one of our A DU units or HUD units, but it’s, uh, each one of them has its own benefits and features.

But we’ve sold a lot of park rentals to a lot of our customers over the country, and they work very well from a short-term rental perspective. Yeah. There’s a lot of things I’m thinking about here and ways to take this conversation, but let’s just stick on the investment side of things. You know, one of the things that I think that’s really cool about what you guys have created and made available to everyone out there is that.

Someone has a nice chunk of land and they have this idea. They’re like, I’ve seen people do this. They’ve put glamping out there and they’ve put these modular homes or ADUs or whatever it happens to be, and they do really well. Rents for $500 a night like some of yours do. They don’t have to buy 10 of ’em at the same time.

They can test it out. They can get one out there and put it up and see how it does, and if it works well, they can get more. We’re building this project down in Medellin where it’s not that way because we have this big construction crew where we want to build ’em all at the same time because the crew’s already there.

And for us to build them one by one, it just, it doesn’t make sense. It would also take much longer. So I think that’s one of the really cool pieces of this sort of investment. Like you could get one just like, well, why don’t you talk a little about yours, Dave, you’re mentioning you’ve added quite a few to the same area ’cause they’re doing really well.

That’s a good point. I’m glad you brought that up, because we get quite a few investors that come to us with their big grand plan. Oh yeah. We’re gonna do, we got a place, we’re gonna do like 20 of ’em. We gotta do like 30 of ’em over the next two years, whatever. Oftentimes our, our response that is just, just do one.

Mm-hmm. You know, I mean, just do one or three or five or whatever, just get started. Because we know that once they start seeing the numbers. There’s no question they’re gonna come back and do the 20 or 30 that they were planning doing on the front end. It’s just when, mm-hmm. You know, oftentimes those plans sort of get stalled because it’s big project, a heavy lift, a big push, you know?

But we’re just like, it’s still one. And you mentioned depreciation. Bonus depreciation works very different than on a modular cabin that’s built on a footer. You can take depreciation just like it was equipment you could depreciation and you can depreciate it over five years. Who knows. I mean, we’re expecting some favorable tax rulings coming out here in the next, hopefully this year, but we’ll see.

But if, you know, even if we don’t get that, you can still, you can depreciate it over five years. And that’s because it’s considered, depending on the model, that’s because it’s considered basically a vehicle over that gross weight. Is that, did I get that right? It’s taxed the same as a piece of equipment, just like you were to buy a tractor or a brake press or something in your factory.

It’s taxed like that. So you know it, it’s a five year lifespan. Same. Same as if you were to buy a travel trailer. It’s a five year depreciation schedule. You mentioned a project of RX we bought. One of the things we do is, we’ll, is we buy large pieces of the property and oftentimes we’ll buy that large piece of property from a single focused seller.

We bought a couple thousand acres in Northwestern Pennsylvania where uh, it belonged to a timber company, an institutional timber company. So what’s on their mind? Only one thing, and that’s timber. So we bought it, and of course we took a lot of timber off in the last couple years, but we also taken that several thousand acres and we’re chopping it up into small, a hundred acre, a hundred, 200 acre, 50 acre, depending on where it is.

We’re chopping up and selling that real estate. Well, on that real estate, there were several areas that were just prime. They’re just like you. You get to that area and you just gotta stop and just like gaze because it’s just like amazing. You got like a 30 mile view. So we had several of those spots available on select pieces of the property.

And so we were like, well, let’s put two park models up on the hill and let’s see what they do. And my initial reaction was, oh my goodness. Again, I. It is like a, an hour north of Pittsburgh and it’s, you gotta drive back roads, gravel roads, just to get to the last couple miles to get to the, to the park miles.

I’m like, well you never know until you try. When we get these two up there mm-hmm And they just run out like crazy. And our max, our highest nightly rental. You wanna take a guess at what our highest nightly rental was? This happened a couple weeks ago in a 400 square foot unit up there. Take a guess.

Gosh. Uh, seven 50. You’re really close. It was like 700, just over 700 bucks. I mean, it was crazy. And so these things are renting like crazy, and so we just keep adding to ’em. Just like I was telling you, we, we tell the people, Hey, listen, just just buy one. Just get started. We know they’re gonna be back. It happened to us and you know, we put two of ’em up on the hill and people loved them and rented out like in a 90 plus percent occupancy rate and really nice, healthy ADRs.

And we just kept adding. I think we’re up to like, I don’t know, forget 11 or 13 of ’em now. We just keep adding them because they just keep doing so well. Yeah. Well things have progressed a lot in the the last decade, not just in the construction and what you guys are doing and options. Also with management.

We talk a lot on this channel about virtual management, and you can have a property in the middle of nowhere and you can do a really good job managing it with all the tools and the processes today. So really exciting and gosh, to think what you can do to the value of a piece of property that was just for a timber use, you know, and you slap 10 of these things on there and they’re renting for $500 a night.

I mean that in the commercial world, that has a. Values are based on income, right? And so if you’re jacking the income way up, then the property’s worth a lot more. Maybe let’s just talk a little bit. One of the things about being in a remote area, we’ve got the construction outta the way, right? Because you guys handle that whole piece comes furnished, so they don’t have to worry about that.

Uh, management can be done virtually, but what about like some of that basic infrastructure? Does, are people using solar with these or are there water tanks? Or how do those sort of main infrastructure pieces go in? I’m glad you asked. There’s a number of different ways you can do this. Obviously many of these places where you would sit, these.

Park malls are not in places where it’s public water, public sewer. Obviously if you got public water, public sewer, great use that. If you don’t, then you can go to, well, and you can go to, uh, a more conventional sewer program. But a lot of times you’re using a tank, using them sewer tank, getting it pumped out every month or two, whatever.

Depending on your occupancy, you could put a tank in the ground. We do have some off grid options. We just done some research and development, so we just did two of our own that are off grid. They run on propane for the heat, the fridge, the stove, uh, your heating and all that. They got a water tank underneath.

So one of the challenges that we found is, is some of those places that I described, you know, you got, you’re sitting up in the middle, up on top of the hill with a 50 mile view or a 20 mile view. Those are usually kind of the most challenging and the most expensive placements to get your facilities to.

And so that may be a place where you would say, you know what? I’ll go solar. I’ll go generate a backup with a propane tank, and I’ll go off grid. So now you don’t have to run your electric in from two miles off or a mile off. So there’s ways you can do it and people love that unique experience. You mentioned that earlier.

Mm-hmm. People today are not like our parents and grandparents where they collected stuff. You know, our parents collected stuff like antiques and, and collectible, you know, stuff. Stuff that you put on a shelf. Our generation and younger, they collect experiences. So if you can get ’em an experience and go really unique and, and put ’em in a place that’s just, that’s just amazing.

They’ll give up the electric, I’m not saying they won’t get electric, but they’ll give up the power lines and maybe a few of those conveniences, even if you gotta go with a portable toilet or something like that. Just something different. They want that experience. So there’s ways you can go off grid with each thing.

That’s still pretty special. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Way more options than we had. Although we left out one important piece, and this isn’t for everyone, but if someone’s out there and they love the silence and they love the tranquility, but they still wanna watch Netflix, you know, they still wanna watch Netflix at the end of the night.

I would venture to say that starlink is probably available in most places these days, but is that accurate? Oh, a hundred percent. You’re talking about, again, just a game changer. Mm-hmm. You don’t have to run the high speed line from two miles off or a mile off. You can now tap right into starlake for whatever, 120 bucks a month.

And you know you’re right. People like that experience, but they also like to have access to high speed internet. So today you’ve got many more office than you did 10 years ago. All the pieces are in place. Well, exciting stuff Dave. Great having you back on the show again today. For people to want to check out all of your products, they can go to zuck cabins.com or zuck cabins.com.

You’ll see we have park models, we got modular cabins, we got a DU units. If you don’t know what that is, do a little research on it. A DU. A lot of townships and cities are now, you know, allowing a licensed a DU unit in their townships. We’ve got Hut products, which is totally different from a financing and a permitting standpoint.

So we got a fairly broad range of modular buildings and we’re shipping ’em all over the country. So check us out. That’s awesome. Yeah, and we also have a page set up on our website, t riches.com, ford slash cabin. We have some more information about Dave and everything they’ve done there, and also a way to to get in touch with them.

Really cool products. I’ve seen them with my own eyes. It’s been a, a pleasure getting to know you better over the last, I don’t know how many years now, but really cool what you guys are doing and thanks. Thanks for having me back, Tim. It was a pleasure. If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, well then you know that I love technology and we can save a ton of time implementing ai, artificial intelligence in the right ways.

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