Expert Panel Insights & Pro Tips : Unlocking Short-Term Rental Success

well welcome back to the short-term rental riches podcast this week we have an extra extra special episode for you and I put the extra in there twice because it truly is this week's episode is not just yours truly but I'm going to be joined by several expert panelists in the industry they have a ton of wisdom and insight actionable advice that are going to help you along your real estate Journey uh we're going to be joined by Bill Faith Jasper Rivers Shawn Moore and will Slickers

and if any of you don't recognize any of those names please know these expert panelists have a ton of Industry knowledge they all also happen to have their own podcast so what we've done is we've condensed this episode down into a bite-size format because our full panel was actually an hour and a half so if you want to catch the full panel you can go over to rest methods.com / panel and there you can get the full hour and a half uh but what we've done

for this episode since we try to deliver short actionable advice is we've cut it down a little bit so in this episode we're going to touch on the top three criteria that all of our expert panelists use to acquire or to find profitable short-term rental properties we're going to talk about how they address management and maintenance efficiently we're going to talk about unforeseen expenses that new hosts come across when they're first getting into the industry as well as challenges we'll be breaking down essential strategies for

guest occupancy and retention and then last but not least and none of us have a crystal ball but we went into where we see the short-term rental industry heading uh Trends disruptions and opportunity in the industry so this episode is going to be jam-packed once again we've condensed it down but if you want to get the full version head over to rest methods.com panel and there you can get the video or the audio format you can also get in touch with all of our amazing expert

panelists that have a ton of knowledge stay tuned let's get right into it we'll just kick it off with you will if you want to give a quick intro and then jump into Jasper next yes sir well thank you Tim again for inviting all of us this is going to be a fun panel um I'm will Slickers I'm the founder and CEO of hospitality. FM I also have a management company called re Recreation rentals um and we're based out in Seattle and we have a couple

properties in Florida as well uh I got started in the industry with hotels I was a Marriott guy discovered podcasting in 2018 was able to quit my Marriott and hotel management job in 2019 a year later due to the podcast and then fell in love with this industry Beyond hotels and vacation rentals and 2021 we launched our podcast Network so now we have over 30 shows and yeah we we get to work with amazing creators and amazing audiences and groups so that's kind of my my

Spiel awesome thanks for joining us will uh Jasper let's jump over to you still waiting for the invite will um my name is jper Rivers I uh I wrote a book about 10 years ago get paid for your pad I'm also the host of the get paid for your pad podcast uh I also have a um educational company overnight success where we have different courses where we recently launched a new Hospitality brand called free Wild uh where we're developing uh and purchasing old old school vcation

rental communities in Old you know vcation rental markets and really bringing up the experience and bringing a new level of experience to those uh to those markets we have our first property in idal and we're uh hoping to acquire another 20 to 25 in the next three to five years it's awesome thanks for joining us Jasper uh Sean we'll jump over to you awesome appreciate you having me Tim and excited for this panel this is like the the heavyweights in the business so I I'm thrilled

to be a part of it and with these guys I've been a full-time real estate investor for 23 years that's all I've ever done since 2000 and got into short-term rentals in 2006 kind of before it was uh popular I started buying these little vacation rentals and putting them on Craigs List and local classifi way before the airbnbs and verbos were really even popular back in 2017 I wrote a book called what the hell is a lifestyle asset and since then we've launched a company called

vessy and we're the founder and CEO where we help other investors get into this game that we all love so much and so really appreciate you having me and and being part of this yeah thanks for being here Sean uh and Bill that that leaves you last and definitely least you know in this group uh I mean I'm just here for two reasons Tim and I really appreciate it I wanted to see how Shawn was going to be dressed today and I wanted to see I

want to see Will's you know hair I mean he's got like the best hair in the industry so in all seriousness I've been doing real estate since I was uh 1992 commercial multifamily uh single family home short-term rentals you name it I've done it all in the space I migrated all of my assets uh on the real estate side into strs in 2015 I still believe today it is the best asset class in real estate for us to invest into I'm still seeing five to six

x Returns on LTR and two and a half to three and a half on MTR uh and I'm sure we're going to talk about that today I'm the founder of build short-term rental wealth ke vacation rentals uh and the Str wealth conference awesome thank you Bill um ton of Industry knowledge here authors people put on events uh I'm excited to dig into it uh my name is Tim hubard I'm I'll be moderating the panel today so I'm the CEO and founder of Midtown stays I built

a portfolio on my own about 70 properties and since then we started managing properties virtually and and um also working on development International host of the short-term rental riches podcast uh so let's just go ahead and jump into it okay question number one and I realize these questions are pretty General uh each of these could have a week-long explanation but for the sake of our audience's time and just trying to get a general consensus consensus we'll try to keep them down to just like two or

three minutes per person so first question is what are your top three criteria for selecting a profitable short-term rental property um Bill why don't we just start with you and then we'll work our way backwards okay sure uh number one is marketability number two is proximity uh and number three is location so all of those things I believe in value stacking and that's why I'm able to just annihilate the 90th percentile of air D and with my owned uh portfolio and co-hosted portfolio I performed about

67% above the 90th percentile I am only in vacation rental markets that have long standing regulation as well I'm Pro regulation I'm not in urban areas so what I'm looking for is and Sean can appreciate this I you know he's got his Montana Wyoming gear going there I bought a property two and a half years patience I finally found my first property in Montana in February and it's literally about 23 feet 16 steps to the river to where and you and I talked about this on

your podcast I can be grilling out you know doing a brisket on my Trager and I got the fly rod going into the water from the deck so proximity is huge for me marketability is huge a lot of people don't visualize when they're walking through a property for the very first time or looking at it on Zillow realor.com how are they gonna mark it awesome okay Sean to you yeah and I think that I I agree with a lot of what Bill said the the number

one thing we look at is rules regulations can we operate a short-term rental and we want somewhere that has a definite yes um we do stick away from like very much like Bill I go to destination areas I'm very um I don't go to the urban areas typically we have we stay in very conservative type of markets next thing is going to be what is what does our investability look like and that is based on Revenue like Market Revenue projections and the the ratio between that

and my acquisition cost there's a lot of really great areas that I'd love to invest but they just don't have they don't have the investability for me I live in in the mountains in Utah and Park City area this is not one of those areas that cash flows really well we love the we love the properties here but the investability is not great for us because acquisition prices are so high versus Revenue so I'm really looking at that investability as an investor and then that third

thing is we're not buying any properties that we can't create that unique experience like what what Bill's saying proximity is huge right are we on I love water right my if I if you're going to catch me it's going to be um either at the office or in a river with a fly rod in my hand right and so we we like properties that we can go create these unique experiences we're in the game of experiences not properties I think it's the biggest mistake a lot

of investors make right now is they think that we're selling a property that's not what we're selling right we're selling an experience and so when you do have that proximity to the the amenities the big profit drivers that people are coming in there for what you can do property can be part of that experience but how close are we to C those certain profit drivers and amenities that people are coming in for okay well Jasper uh let's bring it over to you yeah I mean definitely

agree with uh what everybody's saying here um you know we the way we look at it is you know we have to be in the mindset of create selling experience versus selling a space right so totally agree with what everybody's saying so you know just to add a couple things to this is for us the alignment with our brand is very important right we have a very specific experience that we're bringing to the to the industry where we're helping people disconnect from their digital devices and

reconnect with nature right so we always want to be very close to to Nature whether that's the mountains whether it's that's in a national park whether that's a river like Bill mentioned or the ocean we want people to to be able to disconnect and and really in reconnect with um what really matters like how people used to spend quality time with each other in the past right playing board games music uh sitting around the campfire right we feel people get too too lost in their on

their devices so to to us that's the number one important most important thing is you know does this property align with of our brand right we want to be two to four hours from major cities driving distance we want to be in those unique natural uh environments um and then one thing that I'll add as well is you know obviously everything that that these guys mentioned um we look at as well but one thing that's important to us as well is the value ad you know

can we build additional cabins right what can we do with this property to really raise the the value of the property and raise the ADR on it right can we install hot tubs or different different amenities um what are obviously the regulations are really important as well uh the zoning uh you know do we need to get conditional use permits things like that but I'd say you know alignment with the brand value ad and and the experience are are the top three things for us love

it uh experience yeah that's uh that's a consensus that's for sure if we we set the wrong expectations uh the the whole thing falls apart doesn't it for our management company we're not like we don't call ourselves co-hosts we don't call ourselves we're not Arbitrage we're not this we don't also own but our management company when we're working with investors or owners that have properties uh just like all these guys are saying regulation is super key so not being in an urban destination but being on

the outskirts is great and what I've been obsessed with since 2017 2018 is creating a destination so we used to have uh this Castle property that was under our management and it was 22,000 Square ft had uh a checkered board floor it had multiple dining rooms it has a safe room that was actually an arcade that we built out and it was the destination so our guests never had to leave they had uh insta card ability so we were able to have them get grocery stocked

up before that we had private Chef offerings literally our guests never had to leave but if they did leave the community which is my second or third pieces the community around them the local businesses that you're able to partner with to showcase and put on a spotlight for them um that's where the real value ad piece is going because then when they do leave or if they do want to leave the property and experience a local town or destination you're able to offer some really great

Insider stuff that you know Google or Yelp wouldn't be able to offer so it's always about creating a destination whether you have a simple home in a nice quiet neighborhood or if you have a beautiful 22,000 square foot Castle just hidden in some you know corner of the world yeah that sounds awesome um well awesome great advice too will great advice from everyone that was a really good really good start I think one thing I I might just add in here is that experience is pretty

much cross the board everyone realizes that we have to have a good unique experience provide amities uh but before that we kind of need to know who we're providing that experience for right uh Our Guest Avatar and so I think that's an important piece that I would just add in there that you guys all of course already know um making sure that this experience that we create is always consistent uh and that the operations behind it are consistent is is a huge piece of the puzzle

as well I'm going to go ahead and just jump into this question on management H how do you address property management and maintenance efficiently and so Bill Let's just bring it back to you and then we'll go through the lineup again yeah I think that's actually one of the biggest fears for people when they're looking to self-manage remotely um I live 20 minutes south of Nashville Tennessee Nashville from like 2013 to 2018 was the number one market in the country uh probably in the world I

think maybe according to air DNA I've never invested there because of like what Sean brought up the regulation it's way too volatile so basically that meant I had to start self-managing remotely and I still do today every one of my properties it's honestly if you have your [ __ ] together and you have some process on the back end and you you leverage relationships referrals and go to the local Facebook groups you can find that the reliable handymen but I think one of the things that

I learned and I've done 29 startups and had probably close to 16 17,000 employees Tim and I used to be a really really bad manager and I learned to become a really really good manager so one of the things is is important and people are probably think this is crazy so every Market that I go into I typically invest into two to three properties and I build my properties in what's called pods right so people talk about the scales of economy I talk about the scales

of relationship I invest into my boots on the ground I will only use a cleaning company that has a handyman that has their own connections and then I help them build out their company right so I leverage my influence if you will in this industry to be able to help them gain and build their business I teach them how to run pnls I teach them I invest into them that's the deal because I want to become the most important person to them great advice Bill investing

in the team um Sean what what are your thoughts on uh properly addressing uh management and Main efficiently I love it and I love this question because I differ a little bit than a lot of these guys on the panel and a lot of people in this industry is I don't self-manage any of my own properties we've been doing this for a long long time and we've never taken on management we believe in like I'm a big proponent of full service property managers and finding the

right ones to help us manage our properties and I and want to going back to a couple of bills points the reason we don't and the we that I haven't is I've never there is economies of scale in in your people right and it's not as efficient for me to go because my properties are spread out I don't buy in pods I buy one property here one property over here one property over here because I buy my my portfolios properties in areas that I want to

go use them I use all of my properties and I don't need two properties in each area there's nothing wrong with that some of our most successful members they have PODS of properties and they get that those better returns because they understand a market they build that team on the ground all those different things that as an investment but personally my portfolio is very spread out and so what we do is we spend a lot of time and effort to figure out who the best management

partners are I always believe like that it's it's a little bit hard to be honest because management partners are the Achilles Hill they're it's as an investor it's one of the it's the most important relationship I have long term is with my management partners and and they're not all created equal and it's it's uh but when we find the right ones like the first question I asked my management partner when I'm interviewing is how can I be your best client just like bill bill says I

want them I want to be really really valuable to them and make sure that that one that they can help us deliver this great experience uh great input um Jasper let's jump over to you yeah I mean our current approach is kind of in the middle between what Sean and and Bill was saying so we partner with a management company for the underground stuff so the cleaning the maintenance uh but we uh we own the online side of it right so the messaging uh the listings

like all of that anything we can do remotely uh we'll own it um but then we partner with a management company to uh to do the on the on the ground work um now the reason that we're doing that is because like Sean is saying like we we want to expand to multiple locations so we rather have one one Community or property in 25 different markets versus expanding in one market right now if we were to purchase multiple properties in in in the same market then

uh we might eventually shift to a self-management approach but uh but as right now yeah we we we look for the best management company and then uh we try to support them as much as possible right um I think one thing that's very important for us like we have very high standards um so you know the management company has to understand that because they might have Cent other clients that don't have those expectations so I think that's really important to set the expectations and then um

hold them accountable and support them as much as we can with our systems and and our knowledge of the of the industry as well so going to help them you know raise the bar for for them as a management company as well awesome yeah so somewhere right there in between but also strategy that can absolutely work um as long as as we get it right right so um will let's jump over to you yeah I was going to say man Sean I wish I had more

owners like you because on our side we have to handhold a lot of our owners and investors because they buy a property because of how popular short-term rentals or Airbnb became during coid that they're like oh I could buy anything and it's going to be a great short-term rental I'm going to make a ton of money and I don't have to do anything it's passive income right wrong that's not the case and they buy a [ __ ] hole or they buy something that's not in

a good destination that's got bad regulations X Y and Z they don't know how to furnish it because you know their sister-in-law is a an expert designer that's designed their house only that they live in and has never actually designed a short-term rental so like you have that happen so we have to kind of say hey as a management company we're going to buy the linen we're going to buy the amenities we're going to buy the furniture like we like legit will finance the whole design

and the aspect of the destination that we're going to manage and then say look our management fee is obviously this but with you having to have 20,000 in pretty much financing done with us um we take more throughout every monthly payout but our team on the the boots on the ground you know we use turno to help find um cleaners and it's been a great kind of marketplace for us but ideally once we get a cleaner on board for about 90 days we bring them internally

um if they're really really good because then we can control better incentives and um instead of doing like extra payouts and stuff with cleaning fees there's more margin to be made as a management company for us if we can actually pay our team on hourly rather than just giving them the whole cleaning uh cleaning fee so for us we focus on investing like Bill said investing in the team making sure that the properties are gradually good and when the team is crushing it they get rewarded

it's awesome will yeah yet again uh another note on how important it is to take care of the people that we're working with and there's no doubt about it like the short-term rental space is a team sport right I mean we can't do this all on our own uh if we're planning on doing it all our own then we're going to get maxed out really quickly I mean so definitely team sport taking care of everyone that we work with no matter whether it's some sort of

a hybrid approach uh like Jasper does or myself and our team is sort of a similar approach you know we have properties scattered around multiple States and uh countries now and so we rely heavily on our our teams on the ground to to to be professional and we support them in every way we can and then we handle all the online piece so a lot of different ways to do it a lot of different uh software options and everything out there now um let's jump over

to uh a question that hopefully will help some of our new hosts or people looking to get into the space and that is what are the top three unforeseen expenses or challenges so this is pretty broad again that new hosts should prepare for so uh someone that's looking to enter the short-term rental space but hasn't quite taken the leap uh Bill let's let's jump back to you I think the biggest issue outs outside of an expense I'll get get there in a second is they don't

learn how to underwrite a property and that's why they've made bad Investments and that's why so many of the professionals uh that got into this very passively and they wouldn't even go and put their own eyes on a property and they trust their agent made bad investments in 20 from 2020 till today there is a science and there is you know some N Dat components that go into underwriting or performance um I I have fif 16 tabs on my massive performa that I teach my Mastermind

members and I use for every single property some of the unforeseen expenses are when you buy a property that's not new construction or specifically when you go to the beach or you buy something today that's you know close to water the the Salt Air the water the moisture the humidity I mean stuff just rots it breaks uh the maintenance costs are always underwritten way too low um and I think the other thing Chan's brought it up is just is regulation so I believe that you have

to do way more than just look at today's current regulation you need to look at the history of regulation in a market you everything every bill that has passed as public record and you should go back at least preco in my opinion if you're going into a market that does not have sound regulation and then the last thing I'll tell you do deep research right find out about lots and about Beach Trends and about access points for ski in ski out all these things deep research

that is that other people are not gonna do and there no are there are no free lunches right we have we have to put some work into this uh underwriting a property crucial the the most crucial step I love that um unexpected expenses being next to water and knowing that a lot of times when someone's selling a property they downplay those maintenance cost because I want to sell the property so I love that regulations super important uh Sean let's let's jump over to you yeah I

I don't want to be a beat a dead horse but I I do want to put an exclamation point on what Bill said especially with underwriting and you know I think that that's one of the biggest mistakes that new investors are doing we all want the easy button right and there's a lot of software tools out there that tell you hey throw the address in here put the bedroom and bathrooms in there and I'm going to spit you out a revenue number that is not how

this game works I can promise you right simple is not always easy the way we underwrite properties is fairly simple I'm like Bill we we have um we do all of our own underwriting we've got all kinds of spreadsheets and things that we pull data from some of those same exact tools that you can just put an address in and it'll tell you that tell you your Revenue number there is a like Bill said we say that there is an art and there's a science to

underwriting and those tools cannot measure the experiences they can't measure the proximity to certain Pro profit drivers because they're just not data points that they're pulling and if you're going to rely on somebody else to underwrite your deals don't blame anybody but yourself when you you know a couple years down the line or the year down the line you're not performing how you thought you were going to perform unexpected expenses on the back end that I see is we all you you know you spend you

save up for the down payment you get this property and you think well I'm just going to go you know to yard sales and everything else in fact I see people saying you don't have to have these great Furnishings you don't have to have all this awesome artwork and do this in your properties you can you can operate on a Sho string budget that may be true but I hope you didn't underwrite at the luxury side of the market right you better have underwritten more at

the budget or economy side and so the unexpected I see people all the time buy properties and then they start trying to furnish them and then they start trying to get their marketing assets and like Sean I can't I can't afford the photo shoot you're talking about and getting this property set up I'm like listen you need marketing assets for the next three to five years you you should have budgeted that because a lot of people just run out of steam right after they buy the

property and so you have to budget to get yourself all the way through that launch right these properties need to be set up they need to have marketing assets we need to be able to launch a property and get through that setup phase and that can sometimes take people six to nine months Let's uh go ahead and jump over to Jasper we still have a couple questions we want to make sure that we get through uh but I love everything you guys said there I think

you know we have to be very diligent right when we do our due diligence that's kind of um big piece there go Ahad add is I'll tell a funny story so you know when I've done close to 600 podcast episodes on Airbnb hosting and I still remember when I when I was at number 100 I had a friend who uh who asked me how many how many podcasts do you do and I said well twice a week and he he started laughing he's like twice a

week what are you are you kidding me like I mean you're talking about Airbnb you're talking about buying a house and creating an Airbnb listing like what what on Earth do you talk about right and I think that's that's it's very funny because this person is actually not one of our investors um so but you know a lot of people who are new to Airbnb that's how they think about it they think you buy home you toss toss it on Airbnb put some photos up takes

two hours and then you sit back and you know the bookings will come in and everything will be you know everyone's going to be a happy buny well that's not how it works I mean you you know the moment you have an Airbnb you're in business you're now an entrepreneur you have departments you have your marketing you have your your operations right you have your Revenue management You could argue you have your sales even right like how do you how do you convince people to actually

stay when you get an inquiry or people reach out you have to answer the phone right you have to have a website where people can find you like there's so many aspects of this business that I think people usually underestimate how much work and how much education is required these days to be successful um that was when I started in 20 2 that wasn't the case at all right you could literally just toss it if you're in a city or you go to a nice location

you toss it Airbnb and boom you make money you know that's it's what we call like the set it and forget it host and uh that game is is over it it just doesn't work anymore it is over isn't it uh it so much to learn um I just I just want to remind everyone that's watching this or this going to be catching the recording that everyone here has a podcast and has lots of amazing advice that goes in much more depth on these topics that

we're talking about today so um we'll make sure to get all this information everyone that's joining us and on the recording so that um everyone can tune in to everyone's podcast uh will let's let's jump over to you yeah um again Sean said it I'll say it I don't want to be a dead horse at the end of the day the one thing you know Tim you asked the question of like what can hosts expect or what are the three costs they kind of creep up

on you and I think from a host hosting standpoint if you're going to be a property manager I hate the word hosting I just like Jasper just said you're in a business right you're you're not a host you're a Hospitality entrepreneur you're supposed to create experiences you're supposed to run a business um coming from the hotel world that's just how I look at it um but at the end of the day the locks are super crucial whether you're in a beach destination the salty air like

Bill said or if you're like in Steamboat where it gets -30 deges uh if your guests are trying to check in and your lock freezes you're kind of screwed right and espe if you're a remote host or operator Hospitality entrepreneur as I just said um that's a big cost and then so also internally as the operator when your team is doing turnover you're going to have the number one thing is going to be white linens are going to get stained whether it's blood other bodily fluids

or makeup that's a big one uh we have a lot of bachelorette parties and after a crazy night someone sleeps on the white you know pillowcase and forgets to take off their eyeliner or cake of makeup that they put on to to show up and at the end of the day that's a cost that you're gonna have to you're have to eat I appreciate you adding some insight in for those of uh those of you out there listening that want to build a business because a

lot of us can get into this you know for the the lifestyle asset side of it a lot of us want to build businesses out of this and the expenses are different I'll just add one uh in terms of not maybe our you know breaking dishes and linens but when we get some big large cap X expenses I'll give you an example that I just had in my fun little portfolio we had a delivery truck ripped the power line off one of the properties recently ripped

the meters right off uh of two apartments and so we not only have a large expense from that but you also have the time that it takes we can't rent out a property with no power right so um when you guys are budgeting this goes back to Bill and Sean you guys talking about underwriting we need to allow for that budget too because you know these things can really Crush someone now a lot of insurance policies cover loss of rents and things like that so I'll

kind of just leave it there but make sure you've got a rainy day fund as well uh okay so oh and this is a dooy of a question you know this is the crystal ball that everyone always wants to know but uh let's let's take this back to you bill um there's a lot of different ways to do this as we've heard just on this panel what is the future of short-term rentals look like to you any Trends challenges uh disruption well I got to say

uh that was not only awesome but it was a ton of fun having all those expert panelists on and a ton of valuable advice in this week's episode remember we did con condense this down to a shorter format just for this podcast release since most of our episodes are a little shorter so if you want to get the full version which I highly suggest you do it's packed full there's not a minute in this panel that you want to miss so you can get that full

version if you head over to rest methods.com for / panel there you can also see the contact information for all of our panelists how you might get in touch with them and any resources that they have to share with you so I hope you enjoyed that episode if you haven't left us a review yet if you haven't left us a review yet and you are enjoying the podcast let us know if you have any ideas that you would like us to talk about in the future

you can send us an email or go to Str strr riches.com there's a spot to submit comments there so I hope you enjoyed this extra special episode this week and until next time have a wonderful week