BiggerPockets's Investment Strategy for Building High-Performing Vacation Rentals

pandemic hit. I saw the writing on the wall. It was just a race to the bottom on pricing. I decided to sell those condos and I started building unique cabins in the woods. I hate to break this to people, but people don't care about your one photo you put up. You're going to get found through video way higher than photos. People are going to pay these high ADRs because they want a feeling. You can have the prettiest website ever and it's not going to matter if

you're don't have any eyeballs there. Well, welcome back to the Short-Term Real Riches podcast. Today I'm with Garrett Brown, the STR expert with Bigger Pockets. He's an investor himself. He puts out some really great content, so I'm excited to dive into some details today with Garrett. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Glad to be here. Can't wait to chop shop a little bit. Anything short-term rentals is my world, so I'm always happy to talk about it. Yeah. Awesome. And it's a big world, isn't it? I

mean, there's there's just so many ways to do it, and I know that you just came out with a guide recently on quite a few of those different ways. Maybe before we jump into that, which has some really interesting insights, tell us a little bit about yourself. Yep. I'm from Houston, Texas. I was, you know, I've been in real estate investing for about eight or nine years now, but I started as a real estate agent. tried all forms of investing under the sun as I started

to like, you know, go through Bigger Pockets and learn fix and flips, buy and holds, wholesaling. I was trying all kinds of things. And I eventually got into generic Airbnb as a lot of people know it, you know, as short-term rentals, a few generic condos around 2019. This was back when, you know, you throw up a futon and as long as you had a microwave and some Wi-Fi, you probably were going to make okay money. Then, you know, pandemic hit. I saw the writing on the

wall as all the institutional money was coming in you into the space and at that point it was just a race to the bottom on pricing. So I knew I needed to build something that wasn't you know so commoditized and I didn't have to you know just rely on the pricing gods out there. And I decided to sell those condos and I started building unique cabins in the woods basically glamping. You know I started a company called Camera Ranch Glamping. We have 20 units now between

three different micro resorts is what we call them. We gross revenue around 1.5 million every single year and we're adding a boutique hotel this year to that portfolio as well. So, I've really fully leaned into experiential hospitality, but all of the basic principles of short-term rentals apply across the board just, you know, be successful in this avenue at all. Right. For sure. Yeah, that that core operation is pretty much the same across all STR types, isn't it? Yeah. But the properties are very different. So, I

know a lot of people have done this and you know, back in 2019 when you saw the writing on the wall, do you see the writing on the wall for this segment of the short-term rental industry, have you have you seen more supply coming in these areas or does it just really depend? Definitely way more supply. I was we've been operating for we started in 20 opened in 2021 about 5 years, but in the past few years supply definitely has gotten further along, but there's still

a very strong demand. I can't remember the exact statistics. So I don't want to butcher it. I know the numbers right though that Gen Z about 65% of them that are booking travel are looking to do something outdoor, nature, hospitality, experiential, whatever you know catchphrase you want to use with it. They are looking craving that type of booking when they are doing it now. And that's only going to keep widening as they get older and generations along with them start to you know explore these different

type. There's a reason why Marriott, you know, they bought getaway cabins, which is now called postcard cabins. Disney is investing in this style of stays. Now Hilton is is partnering with different glamping outdoor hospitality ventures. Like there's a reason why a lot of this institutional money is coming here because even with the supply increasing, the demand is definitely outpacing the supply. But all of that to say, the big advantage we have with experiential hospitality or nature hospitality is that we have a product like it's very

easy set it up for the guest to understand like what you're trying to market or brand for them in this product. But if you don't understand like how to really deliver to the guest that you specifically are seeking and be able to convey what they're going to feel when they come to your property, you're going to lose in this. And I say that as a like a marketing person. If people are going to pay these high ADRs because they want a feeling, you know, I don't

want to compare it too much to like high-end luxury things, but when you think of Louis Vuitton, they never talk about price and all these other things out there because they're busy selling you the feeling that you will have when you have their product. And it's the very same mindset you need when you're building these luxury nature getaways is you have to be able to convey to the people the get your guest avatar that you're going after what they are going to feel when they come

out to these type of places. And that's the people that I'm seeing that are winning us included. My social media team mixed with me too. We do a really good job of making sure people understand the experience they're going to have and don't just sell them on the amenities and things that you can provide. Yeah. Excellent point. Uh I did an interview recently with Gil Chan. He's the founder of Crafted Stage where you know they do direct bookings and and direct bookings are a massive piece

of you know these experiences. So what would you say Garrett? Maybe just a couple tips like how do you get that message across to potential guests that haven't booked your property yet? Yeah. No Gil's awesome, too. I love Gil. He's chatted with me a few times and he's he's a great guy to talk to about direct bookings because even in some of my early chats with him, he helped unlock some things in my brain cuz we do about 90% direct bookings at Camera Ranch Glamping. Oh

wow. And and it all comes from what you're talking about with like how do we set them up to understand the experience they're going to get. I'm pretty good at a lot of facets of short-term rentals, but the marketing side is definitely like my strong skill set that I lean into. So, I could go on for hours, but I'm going to try to chop this down a little bit to make it just like people can kind of understand like what it takes to get them down

all the way to a direct booking potential. So, I have a three-step funnel that we take on at Cameron Ranch Glamping, which is basically, you know, you have your top of funnel, your middle of your bottom of funnel, which is classic sales conversions that um people do in the marketing world. The top of funnel is by far the most I'm trying to think. I don't want to say underutilized cuz I see a lot of people try and when I say top offunnel this is really in

today's world social media is is what is the main top ofunnel source there's also Google search or AI search which is another conversation but when we talk social media which is where a vast majority of our bookings come from when people will put up a photo of their unit they'll put up guest reviews as like you know make a collage or something like I hate to break this to people but people that doesn't give them an experience and people don't care about like your one photo

you've put up. What every person needs to do if they've really wanted to in any facet of marketing and driving, you know, social media views is you need really good video content. I'm not saying, you know, you go out with your iPhone and film a couple pieces like you need to hire an amazing drone videographer and an amazing I I don't want you don't need horizontal ver video. You want vertical video and you're going to pay a couple thousand dollar to get some amazing video. But

the thing about that is you can take that video and for a year plus make a ton of social media clips for it. You only should be doing video content on your social media. You can do static images and photographs occasionally. There's there's a couple ways to do that, but by far your best way to grow your platform is to do top-notch video content reals. You know, Instagram reels or Tik Toks. But the big key is you need text on screen on that video that when

the second that video plays and people are scrolling that you speak to who your target audience is and who like what location you know they should be considering. Example of that is some of our most viral videos because we are a romantic couple's getaway destination near Houston, Texas. Our videos will say within the first couple seconds on screen, you know, romantic couple's cabin 1 hour from Houston or romantic getaway Houston, Texas. Like those two keys, and it's going to take a lot of consistency, but if

you can speak to exactly, you know, you're speaking to people that are near your location and are exactly who you are trying to bring in and who will fit that experience. having that highquality video conversion mixed with language that talks directly to the consumer and feels like you are speaking to them. And it's the same on the the Google search side. So people are going to be googling, you know, couples getaways near Houston, you need to be focusing your content on your websites to fit that

kind of narrative as well. If you can get the top of funnel, like where you get as many organic eyeballs on your content without have to pay for ads, like make sure your funnel's converting, you know, is working with somebody like Gil or, you know, Mark from Booley to make sure your website's converting. But if you're not getting eyeballs to your website, you're doing paid ads on Meta and you don't even have any successful organic content, you're going to be fighting a losing battle. I just

see a lot of people, like I said, like they put up a photo of a fire pit and it's just, you know, it's just like an iPhone photo and then they just the caption is like come have a great time, you know, and it's like and they're like, why am I not growing on Instagram? You literally are not giving out content that speaks to the people and you're going to get found through video way higher than photos. And I speak always like in from a lot

of marketing side, you have to just talk to exactly who you're trying to speak to. So if you're trying to sell the experience, then once you've caught their attention with, you know, this is a romantic getaway near Houston. Then after that, you can start in that video, you can keep text on screen besides the really good video content that you have. The text on screen can say things like, you know, lounge and stargaze in our hot tub. That's when you got them caught within those first

few seconds of the scroll when they're on social media. And then you start to like let them experience within those 15 seconds of what exactly it's going to be on property. And the big key is like getting that really good video content because it's hard to sell the experience if you don't have quality to sell the experience to people visually, you know? So that's a long-winded way to probably get into like what it actually takes to build the experience or like set up the, you know,

set up what you're trying to do on the marketing side. But if you can speak to your audience and understand that video content right now is truly a driver of organic reach, that's a good start. And you don't know quality until you know quantity. So you're going to have to post a lot of times to learn these tricks that we've posted thousands of times. That's why we've learned all this type of data. So don't get discouraged if your first, you know, 10 videos don't do anything.

You need to probably make a hundred before you even know what is good. So yeah, get some good video. I think that's an easy one. uh get some good video and and break it up. You know, these are for a year's worth potentially of of really good clips, but you got to have people at the top of the funnel before you can get them through the bottom. So, if you're not them at the top, you know, you could have you have the prettiest website ever and

it's not going to matter if you're don't have any eyeballs there. Okay. So, and we really need to understand our guest avatar or you know, our ideal client. So, how did you guys go about that, Garrett? So obviously, you know, a lot of times cabins can be smaller, you know, where they only really fit like a couple, but there are large familysiz cabins. I mean, what was your guys's approach? And were these brand were these new builds or were these existing properties? Okay, they were new

builds. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We did new builds pretty much on every single one. The cool thing about short-term rentals now is over the past seven years or even longer, you know, they've been around forever. There's so much more data now. So, like, you know, using things like AirDNA and Price Labs and B&B Calc and all these different tools that are out there, you can go into a market that you're looking in and start to look at like what bedroom count truly performs the highest because I

know I I've talked a lot about, you know, couples cabins, but some of our properties that we co-host more for, some of our best performing properties are nature stays that are on a lake, but they're much bigger family houses. and we make sure we speak to that demographic when we do marketing for them or you know how we set up our website. The one thing I want people to know about is you either go big or go small in short-term rentals right now. You don't want

to get caught like with like a threebedroom, two bath. Like I mean there's definitely successful ones like that, but I believe if you want to be like truly successful and stand out from like why would somebody just get a hotel or you know other reasons or you know is if you have like a as big of a house as you can get, you know, five bedrooms plus, you're going to stand out and get way more bookings in the short-term rental world cuz that's very hard for

a hotel or a lot of properties to compete with. The other opposite end of that is a one-bedroom, one bath cabin that's a lot smaller, but you're speaking to a specific demographic. I would say I'd say like, you know, if you can sleep three to four people, that's like a really really sweet spot, especially in glamping. Two is great, but even better if you can add that third. Then you can get girls trips and, you know, like maybe small families that want to come out. But

I believe if you get caught in the middle in short-term rentals, you know, a two bed, two bath, or unless that specific market that you're in calls for that specifically, you know, I don't I can't think of a market that does right now, but I'm sure they're out there. That's how you'd probably get caught in the middle and probably always kind of borderline with not making as much revenue based on the expenses and, you know, the operations that you have to have compared to each style

of unit. Ky, all you knew where I kind of wanted to go with mine because I saw a gap in a market using, you know, data tools out there. But like a quick and dirty rule is go big or go small. I believe in short-term rentals and just look at the market that you're uh comparing into. Sometimes that's challenging though, you know, if there are no glamping or there are no large properties in the market, you kind of just have to gamble a little bit. Huh.

Yeah. I mean, I use a rule called this. Like if I'm looking at a market and there's, you know, even the first market I went into for Cameron Ranch Glamping, it's near a lake, but it wasn't like a big popular destination in Texas. The rule that I kind of just think of, and this isn't a hard rule, it's, you know, loose, is I have it's 60 3010. If you're 60 minutes from a major metro hub, you know, a million plus people, and even better if you

have a couple, you know, other cities that are 2 hours away, and 30 minutes from some type of like state, regional, or national attraction like a lake, forest, Disney World, I don't know, you know, I mean, whatever attraction you want to throw out there. National parks are great, but they obviously cost more to get into and people kind of underestimate like state parks where people go back every single year and it's not as competitive in some of those markets to think about this kind of thing.

And then if you're the 10 is just being 10 minutes from civilization, you know, a gas station, Dollar General, anything out there because the further you get away from civilization, the harder it is to get cleaners, you know, repairmen, packages, I don't know, all kinds of things that like operationally become tougher. So, it's it's not a guaranteed, and I've seen a lot of success with this with tons of glamping sites. If you are near a major metro hub and you're also near some kind of attraction

that people continuously go, you have two markets to already to already market to. Basically, you have the ones that are the, you know, living in that downtown metro that you can go, hey, you need a nature getaway. Hey, you, you know, and they're they're driving to it. It's a simple, you know, we get a lot of weekday bookings because people can drive to our destination very easily. And in the 30, you know, if if you're near some kind of attraction, you already have people coming out

there looking for that type of lodging. And when I built my first my first glamping unit, it was a geodessic dome. There was nothing like it in the area. So, I took a little bit of a gamble, but I knew that I had Houston in my backyard and which is one of the biggest cities in the country, so I could market to them. And I was sitting between a lake and a national forest. you know, neither one of them is like, you know, they're not the

Smoky Mountains, but I used to go to this same lake every single summer as as a kid, and we'd always rent some kind of, you know, lakehouse on there. So, I knew people came out there for these type of things. So, there's definitely some opportunity out there, especially in some markets that may not be as utilized. So, as long as you have a base that you can go to and you this kind of style of stay, you know, bigger houses, there's not a ton of competition

with those because they're harder to pull off. But there's a reason why like I'd rather have one property making a lot of money than having, you know, 10 or 11 properties and they're each, you know, gross revenue 30k. Um because the, you know, you're you're going to spend a lot of time on every single property. I believe operationally it's easier to run one bigger property even though it's harder to build it out than it is to run several smallers that are just not generating the revenue

that you want. Yeah, sure. Some excellent points there. Being near people is helpful. An hour is definitely not too far away. I think the great thing about being a really good marketer is that you're just you're creating your own demand too, right? You guys are at 90% direct booking. That's amazing. But it didn't start at 90%, right? And so I guess the gamble is you know judging your own marketing powers making sure that you are near people and being willing to invest in the property you

know like you don't go from zero to 90% direct bookings in one day. How long what was like year one like for you guys just out of curiosity you know like bookings versus direct bookings. Yeah, our year we started off pretty heavy with some direct bookings because again like if you can't do marketing, there's a ton of people out there that can. I see do you all the time like shy away from spending some money on marketing and it's like if you work with somebody that

is good at this, which there's quite a few of them out there now, they're going to make you triple, you know, like if not more than what you're spending. So, you know, you don't have to be like the world's best marketer to figure this out. uh you just need to work with somebody that that does and be willing to invest a little money. So I have a marketing background. So I had already knew going into it I needed to be ramping things up. We probably the

first year were maybe 50/50 but I did a lot of social media like paid for some influencers to come out like all these like things that were truly driving our like early on social media presence. And so I spent some money on you know on that to make sure it helped boost us up there. But we still love the OTAAS though. I never want people to like like there's, you know, everybody has their gripes on them and there's definitely, you know, issues here and there, but,

you know, there's issues with direct bookings that come up too. I would just be on as many platforms as you can and then like you say, like you start at 0%. So, as long as you're upticking every single month, you know, even if it's one or two%, like that's a win. You know, you can't too hard on yourself and you you hear stuff like mine, oh, I'm not at 50% yet after a year. And it's like, no, it's probably going to take you a couple years

unless you work with somebody that truly is like really, really good at this. And you have the property that's going to stand out like that. One thing about it is like the cooler the property or the better it does on video, the cheaper and the easier it is to market. Better the product, the better the marketing. So, you know, you got to be honest with the product you have. And if if it's not at that level that you want, then maybe there's something you need to

enhance on it that will, you know, say you spend5 or $10,000 on a cool water feature or a sauna or I don't know, you like whatever you want to throw out there. That right there, you should be thinking of it as like a marketing spin because it will make your marketing cheaper over time the better your unit performs as a product online, basically. So, it's kind of a, you know, two-way street on that one. people, especially if they've been investing in just kind of what we

might think of as like traditional short-term rentals, don't really think it as much of a business as they should. And when you talk about paying someone to do marketing, like you're running a business, you know, and in a normal business, you do marketing. Usually, you get word of mouth, of course, but most people have a marketing budget for their businesses. Whereas, I think someone coming from like a traditional short-term rental to creating an amazing experience or, you know, glamping or boutique hotel or whatever it is,

like we need to include that as well. But the cool thing is, yeah, after after it starts coming in and you build up that base, you really have a an advantage over incomers, you know, new people coming in. So, even if the market's really increasing in supply, but you've got a two-year head start and you've got an amazing bed of reviews, then you're going to have more visibility, too. So, um, exciting. Well, gosh, there's a lot of options in the short-term rental world. you you went

the glamping route after trying out the other route before. Uh tell us about the guide that you put together, Garrett. So, um I wrote uh the glamping investor at Bigger Pockets. It kind of just details out my entire journey of building out a few different micro resorts. Now, you know, I never had institutional money come and help me with any of this. It's always been my own funds. I've done it in creative ways. you know, even land hacking is something I talk about in the in

the in the book as well, which is kind of like house hacking, but for this style of investing. And then, you know, I go into a lot of details about operations and marketing and all the wins and losses that I've had from learning and, you know, being in this industry now for a few years. The thing about it, and you mentioned it like well, like even if you have just a generic short-term rental, right? Like a couple of them, like it's still a business, and there

are very easy ways to still make your products stand out more. And, you know, if you just think creatively, you don't even have to spend a ton of money. It goes back to being speaking to your guest avatar. And I talk about that a lot in the book, is if you're a basic place and you don't really you know what to do with it, like pick your market. I'm gonna be the best pet friendly rental in the area, right? And you just make it as all

the bells and whistles that a pet friendly place really needs to where it's like even another level of that and you're going to stick out and you can do marketing around that and you you're speaking to an exact customer, you know, and I've done that with several other things, but those are the kind of things I talk about in the book as well. Just, you know, getting an identity, figuring out your guest avatar operations, all the automations that we use, all the special hospitality features that

we use. I, you know, obviously I wrote the book, so I I believe in it, too. But at the same time, it's hard. I think it's about $9.99 on Amazon, which is like less than a Chipotle burrito. And I believe that there's a lot more value in this book, even though a Chipotle burrito sounds very good right now, lunchtime. So, yeah, I definitely recommend anybody check it out and let me know if you have any questions, but I but I believe it can help short-term rental

investors all around. Okay, awesome. So, you've got all your experiences in there. Can you tell us just a little bit more you do break down different property types as well? Absolutely. Yeah. I talk about returns, things like that. Yep. Yep. So, um I go in a lot to, you know, one of the biggest when we talk about unique nature stays. One of the biggest things that comes up is people wanting to go like the cheap route and put up a safari tent, you know, like a

we call it a softsided structure, right? And I built up several softsided structures. I go into why I believe hard-sided structures are a much better investment. You know, A-frames, mirror houses, tree houses, like real deal cabins. I talk about the differences there. I talk about I I go even further into the 603010 rule and really like break down like what it means to find a market talking tourism numbers. You should be able to read this guide and know exactly what market you want to go into

by doing some research, what kind of property you want to go into, deciding on what your five or 10 year goals are. That way when you're developing this style property or even, you know, developing your business in general, how to think from a high level. That's one thing I wish I would have thought of more as I was really getting into this. I, you know, I thought a few years ahead, but I didn't think like 10 years ahead. Now, the further I've gone my investing journey,

I'm taking all of these learnings and explaining like why I believe you should be thinking 10 years ahead. So that way you can slowly work your way back and piece up each year to lead up to that cuz it changes a lot and you don't expect it to. the moment you, you know, you just start investing and you're ready to go and you're just like, just get up the first place and let's keep going, which is a good energy to have. But I would have made

less mistakes and probably built my company even better if id really had that vision for 10 years. And then I went to school for hotel management actually in college at the University of Houston, Hilton. And so I talk a lot about operations inside there too, especially from a hotel style viewpoint because that when you're building a micro resort, you're building a micro hotel of sorts and it's even like short-term rentals still is the feel that we like to give. So it doesn't feel, you know, corporate

or anything, but at the same time, you run it on the operation side like a hotel with, you know, cleaners and uh maintenance and all these other things, too. And I really go deep into that as well um with you know all all the blunders I've had and in and out and I even dude the best though I don't about the best part but the most engaging part is I even talk about how I had a goat sacrifice at one of my properties and how we

handle so tell you on why you want to read the the book that I don't know what else to sell you at this point. I was saying goat sacrifice. I've heard a lot of things and it's hard to it's hard to make these things up, but I haven't That's my first goat sacrifice that I've heard. It was It was my first 11 years now. Yeah. Awesome. So, we'll make sure everyone knows where they can find that uh in just a few minutes here. Garrett, I want

to ask you a little bit about the operations. I didn't know you had a background in operations and and running a glamping site, you know, even if it's only an hour outside the city. You mentioned the 10-minute rule being 10 minutes from, you know, a place. I think that's an excellent idea. We we manage a lot of different properties, a lot of different places, and there's certainly more challenges in some than others. But what are maybe one or two things that or maybe is there one

thing that kind of caught you off guard with the operations or were you pretty well prepared when you launched these things? The thing you you know, every piece of land is just so different, too. Like it's something as simple as where the water flows on land when rain comes is so monumentally important to understand that I didn't understand when I was building out some parts of it. You know, you don't know what you don't know. So, a lot of these things I'd have to be sitting

at, you know, at the land watching where the water flowed and I didn't do any of that. But, we have roads that wash out a good bit. We're always dealing with gravel. I'd say we run it like a hotel. So, like we have very solid laundry, cleaners, all that. The the thing that is much tougher on these type of properties is the landscaping and like the cleaning of the landscaping because your cleaners are used to working inside getting, you know, doing typical cleans and you then

have to have them help on some outdoor duties which some of them are not hard but the landscaping is just way more effort than I ever expect. Even as just keeping up with the grass, you know, we are constantly mowing and obviously have crews and I have, you know, people that work on the team that do it. But the the one thing that I would just prepare a little more for and I'm preparing a lot more all the places I'm you know working on is the

landscaping side. Another thing is like landscaping is one of the best investments you can make on a property because it's truly defines like you know how people feel and like the look and everything that goes with it. But it's a lot to upkeep over there. Even just on the operations side like we do use a lot of virtual assistants. We use a lot of AI. We have boots on the ground, but not anything that's necessarily guest facing. So, we try to run it still like short-term

rentals where it's all selfch checkckins, um, ID checks through email, all that. But my cleaners and handy people that work for me and like a few people that I have in the area, they're still really good about when somebody needs something, they are able to get out there and help. You have to think remote. We do a lot of videos. We do QR codes that, you know, how do you work the sauna? you can scan a QR code and like there's a video of me showing

you how to work the sauna. Like that eliminates a ton of questions. And so we try to think virtually and if we could never go to the property, how would we do it? Um and then at the same time, we we still do obviously like have some boots on the ground that truly help us. But when you think remotely, we eliminate a lot of things before they become a bigger issue because and a lot of it too just comes from experience. It's like we learn over

time what guests specifically need and what are the biggest issues that constantly happen and how can we eliminate that from being, you know, a constant issue, right? For sure. Yeah. Always trying to answer the questions before the guests actually ask them, right? That's the that's the goal. Yeah. Landscaping, that's a great point. I I love landscaping personally. I think it's just I mean it's like painting a house, you know? But it's like and it's also it can be cost effective but it also can be extremely

expensive out on some land projects. I know we have a project in in Medin Colombia and and it rains a lot there and our budget for the drainage was much higher than I ever expected. Yeah. And uh plants grow really quickly there. Like it'll turn into a jungle in like you know a few months. Okay. Well, I'm I'm curious. What is your uh what are you guys using for a tech stack? Like what programs do you use? So right now my my management software is Logifi.

It's basically the brains of operation for me. Cleanings and maintenance go through turno and we also use uh project management software basically called notion which is kind of AI powered. You know we have price labs for our dynamic pricing. We use Quo as our business phone line which it used to be open phone but now it's quo. Love that one cuz I connect it with notion. I can connect to we use HostBuddy AI for a lot of AI tools. I use Claude for a lot of

things. I use GoH High Level for like my CRM and like email, chat bots, all those kind of stuff. Those are like definitely like the big ones. And then for the boutique hotel, I'm pretty sure we're going to use cloud beds, but then a lot of the other tech stack will kind of fall into it as well too. So that's kind of my my main one. But I do love Logifi. I um it definitely is, you know, everybody's got their preference on ones. I kind of,

you know, I always recommend people get do the trials for different ones because once you sign up with the property management software, it's very hard to switch once you get you get direct bookings and stuff. So, I say is that like take your time if if you know, especially if you have no properties or like one or something right now and one or two. Um, just take your time and get do a lot of trials and ask questions and, you know, feel free to reach out

to, you know, anybody that you want to to see that has experience with different ones because it's it's tough to switch once you get there. But I have I love Logifi. I haven't wanted to switch, but I've just heard some nightmare stories about, you know, people with 10 units and they're I want to go from this one to, you know, another one. And it's like, all right, good luck. Have fun with that. Yep. We've we've certainly been there. Back in the day, we currently, but we

work with uh partners that change fairly often or, you know, when they when they join us, they have to change. So, we we go through that. Yeah. It's it's doable, but it's not fun. For sure. Yeah. It's an exciting space though. I tell people this all the time like we use Hostaway which is one of the most well-known in the industry but we don't actually use Hostaway for all of the main components and and you mentioned some yourself. So you're using Logify but you're not using

it for your task management or housekeeping because you use Turno use Price Labs for revenue management. You know you're using a phone system outside of it. So I think a lot of us today are like we are relying on on a PMS. I agree. Got to make sure we choose a good one. And it's mainly for their connections with the OTAAS. You know, have a good connection with Airbnb and and Booking.com and all that. But that's exciting space. You know, things are changing so quickly with

Claude. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I love it. You mentioned some great tips there. QR codes, having videos there on the property, especially for things that maybe aren't that intuitive or or really for anything that you know if if more than one person's asking the same question, it's very likely more people will as well. Right. For sure. Yeah. I mean, I it always blows my mind too what guests will like ask questions about cuz you can give them all the instruction till you're blue in the face

sometimes and they still will uh call you to ask or message you. Like we'll we put a ton of Wi-Fi codes out there. We have a placard inside the unit. And these are tiny cabins, too. So, it's very easy to see. And it says the Wi-Fi name. Scan. We still have people call us and go, "Hey, what's the Wi-Fi?" But I call it a digital hug anyways. People just want to know someone's on the other other side of the line. That's a good way to put

it. Yeah. So, don't don't be alarmed if you could do everything in your power to set it up and people still reach out to you because they just want to know that somebody's there sometimes. So, well, awesome insights today, Garrett. Uh, you got a lot of cool things going. Everyone check out Garrett's book. Where can they find your book? Where can they find you? What's the best best place to connect? Yep. So, you can find my the glamping investor. It's on biggerpockets.com. You can get it

on Amazon as well. Garrett Brown at biggerpockets.com is my email if anybody wants to reach out and chat. I write the newsletter over there. I am on the the Bigger Stays YouTube channel, which is all short-term rentals from Bigger Pockets. And then my Instagram, Garrett Brown re like real estate. I'm always on there too, more than I probably should be. So, here we are. I'd love to chat with anybody any questions they have. Well, thanks for coming on.