Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. I’m happy you’re here again. One of the most important things that we all look for investing in real estate is actually making money. But I think a lot of us truly understand what our profit margins are and how much is left at the end of the day.

So I’m really excited to have our guest on today because he knows a lot about this. David Richter, and he wrote Profit First for real estate investing. So we’re gonna dig all into that. Welcome to the show, David. Thanks, Tim. Thanks for having me. Yeah, great to have you here. And, um, you know, there’s, we focus a lot on this show and with short-term rentals.

Mm-hmm. Um, but also traditional real estate. And I think when we get to the short-term rental side, there’s even more going on, you know? Oh yeah. When you have your traditional real estate, you’ve got your utilities, your property tax, uh, things like that. But with short term rentals, there’s all these other little expenses and, and I think it really.

Makes things fuzzy for a lot of people. And I, I don’t think a lot of our, our audience and a lot of people that I meet out at the conferences actually really know how much money they’re making at the end of the day, which is the most important piece. So why don’t you tell us, uh, about your journey and, and your book, uh, and let’s dig into the details.

So I would say that in the single family space, if there’s an exit strategy, I’ve probably been a part of it. Because in my early twenties I got linked up with a real estate company that we grew to about 25 residential deals a month. So we were flipping wholesaling. We had some turnkeys, we did rentals, we did lease options, so we did lots of stuff in that company in my early twenties.

So I got a huge just real estate education there because I was there for five years. I got to really learn how to they grew and how they scaled, but that’s where my eyes were open too. That. Even though we were doing 25 deals a month at our highest point, we were spending about 26 worth of deals out the door.

And it’s like, what are we doing here? So that really opened my eyes even to like, it doesn’t matter that we’re doing all these deals, if we’re not keeping anything at the end of the day, then I was going to masterminds and events. And once we got people one-on-one and not the people on the stage, but like one-on-one, they tell us the same stories.

Like, I don’t know where all my money’s going. I’m like, yeah, we’re doing lots of deals, but where’s all the money? Then I worked with another guy after that stint with that company that had about one deal a month and was in the same position. But that guy actually had about 19 short-term rentals at the time as well too.

But he was still chasing deals and chasing the money and didn’t know he, I’ll never forget one of the things he said to me. He said, I really don’t know. Where my money is. He’s like, I feel like I should have more in the account. But he didn’t have that clarity like you were talking about. And a lot of people just don’t understand when the business finances, especially if you start to do more than one property, and especially if you’re doing more than one property at a time.

Like if you’ve got multiple projects, plus you might have some in service, plus you might have, you know, things just going on six ways from Sunday. Especially like you said, in the short term world, I feel like. It’s there. It just happened so quickly and it’s so active. So that just really did it opened my eyes completely.

That doesn’t matter if you’re doing 25 deals a month, one deal a month, if you’ve got a small portfolio, if you’ve got a large portfolio, that a lot of people just struggle with that clarity, and a lot of people also struggle with financial freedom. Which is why we get into real estate or business or entrepreneur, you know, if you come into that entrepreneur, because it really doesn’t matter how many deals you do, it matters what you do with the money that determines the financial freedom.

So that really. Really set me on this path that I’m on now. I own a fractional CFO company and I wrote, like you said, the book Profit First for Real Estate Investing because I saw this as an epidemic. Like it doesn’t matter where you are on this journey, if you don’t know some of the rules of money and like that you’re actually playing the money game and not.

Date, then it’s like, we gotta teach these foundational pieces. That’s what drove me to Profit First in starting this business and everything. So that’s what we’re doing now. We work with about a hundred people on a monthly basis in the real estate world. So we’ve grown quite a bit over the last few years.

But ’cause a lot of people have just, they quietly raised their hand like, yes, I need the help. I’m, you know, I have no idea what’s going on with the money. Uh, so that’s just a brief overview of from the early real estate days to now. Yeah. And that’s, that’s, that’s the reality. Um. The more, the more you got going on, the more complicated it gets too.

So. Exactly. Um, what would you say, you know, I mean, where, where’s the starting place for someone out there? Yeah. If they’re like, Hey, I’ve got, you know, five, 10 short term rentals and, and I am the exact person David just mentioned, I feel like I should have more money and I have no idea where it’s going.

So I would tell anyone if you’re listening to this, the starting place is the same no matter what. Especially if you have nothing in place currently. Like if a dollar comes into your business and you have one big black hole bank account where that dollar comes in and it gets sucked out again, never to be seen and that swirling vortex of doom out there, I would say profit first.

Is a cashflow management system. So the book is called Profit First because a lot of businesses end up putting their profit last. They say, let me pay everyone else and their mother and maybe we’ll have something someday or maybe at the end of the year, or maybe I could take a draw next month. You know, they don’t have consistent money systems in place, but Tim, a lot of other books.

Have called that out like Rich Dad, poor Dad, like pay yourself first. He says that what about a thousand times in that book and the Richest Man in Babylon and just timeless books about money and the management of money. Tell the the listener, or the reader like you should be taking a portion of that first to be able to pay yourself and make sure you’re healthy.

Make sure the business is healthy, especially if you’re running a for-profit business. So I would tell everyone to start the same. This. What I like about Profit First is to, I think it took it a step further than any of those other books had before because it gave a system. It didn’t just say, you should pay yourself first and stop there.

It’s like, okay, here’s how. How do I start this? Where do I start? What do I do in order to get this magical profit into my pocket? You know, when I feel like all the money’s going six ways from Sunday. So Profit First is built on the envelope method. So that’s been around since the dawn of time, basically, where there’s been intentionality when you get something in, you’re intentional with those dollars.

In recent years, probably the last, I don’t know, 50 years, 60 years, it’s been very popular for the envelope method. Dave Ramsey made it popular probably within the last 20, 25 years in the personal finance space to put little envelopes and put all your expenses in there and name all the expenses. So it could be your, you know, your groceries, the gas, utilities, all that stuff.

There’s money that goes in there every month, and you’re very intentional with those dollars versus like it all comes in and it just all goes out and you have no idea what’s happening in business. I would set up some physical business checking accounts. The very first account, now it’s the profit first system.

So there’s five foundational accounts, but I would have you just start with one. If you’re like, what’s a good starting point? Because this is something anyone can do from this podcast. Like if you wanna learn more, I’ve got more content. I could go deeper and go through all the entire system. But if you’re gonna start somewhere, especially if you’re feeling like, oh my gosh, where is that money?

How do I get a handle on this? How do I put it in my pocket? I would set up one account. Since it’s the Profit First system, you would think I would say a profit account, but I actually call the very first account you should open up the owner’s pay account or the Escape the Rat Race account. It’s there to pay yourself consistently from what’s coming into your business.

Because if you’re not doing that. Probably a lot of other things in your life are affected. Like if you are feeling constantly stressed that you don’t have money or that you don’t have some regular consistent income, even in an inconsistent business, then you’re probably not gonna be making the best decisions for yourself, for your family, for the business if you don’t pay yourself first.

So open up literally a pay yourself first account. We call it the owner’s comp account because it’s the owner’s compensation. So for every dollar. Take a little bit from it. So if you have five to 10, just what you said, Tim, like if that’s, mm-hmm. If that’s who’s listening right now, if you have five to 10 properties, you might say, well, I can’t pay myself what I need from these five to 10, or like, I can’t, where do I start?

How much do I pay myself? I would start with what can you physically do that won’t take the business? You know, like even whether it’s a certain dollar amount or a certain percentage. In the book, we give target percentages even for, for buy and hold properties. Like if you’re this size of business and you’re making this much an income, this is how much you should put in different accounts.

But if you’re just starting out, I tell people, do what you can, but start with at least 1%. Like if you don’t have profit as a habit, it might be forcing yourself to do something you haven’t been doing. And that you might have some bad habits with your money currently, like dollars come in and they all go back out.

So I tell people, start with what you can do. If it’s as little as 1% great, if it’s as great as 50%, and you could take that much from the business because you could start to pay yourself because you’re trying to exit a W2 job. Like this is where I want you to at least have that guidance set up. One account, every dollar that comes in, you put money into that other account and you start to pay yourself consistently.

That’s how you can start this whole thing. So the, the, our industry, the short term rental industry has gotten pretty tough, uh, over the last few years. Yeah. You know, it has like millions of new rentals have entered and more supplies pushed, uh, prices down. And so I know there’s a lot of people out there just saying, David, I.

I can’t pay myself like I’m underwater, you know? Or I, I think I am again. Yeah. Like, maybe they don’t actually know, but I mean, what would you say to those people that are, uh, in that position? Those people, when they come to me, I think they’re trying to battle against themselves. Like, I can’t physically do this.

I always ask them. If you don’t have profit, don’t you think you have a system that should now help you to engineer that profit? Like are you, I usually lead with a question like, are you sick of being where you are? Like, are you sick of being underwater and not having the money that you want? Well, then we have to put good systems and habits in place so that way we don’t end up with the same result.

If you keep, what’s that right? The definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. And a lot of people don’t understand that. It’s really not the deal flow and it’s really not. I mean, obviously you have to have deals and you have to have properties, and you have to have income.

It’s less about the amount and more about what you do with it. So that’s what I tell people. If you’re not comfortable with where you are now, then let’s put some systems in place. And if you’re saying, well, I can’t do the recommended percentages, that’s why I say start with 1%. Like if you’re living off a hundred percent now.

Can you live off of 99? And if you are upside down, that’s where we have to force ourselves to take a look, to say, okay, if I really, if I’m living on above a hundred percent and you’re shoveling money into your business, do you really have a business, number one? And number two, is there. Do we have to stop the bleeding somehow?

One way is to set up a system like this that it’s no more guesswork. Like either you are living off a hundred percent or you’re living off 150% or whatever, and you’re shoveling your own money in constantly, and this just helps you get that clarity of how much can I put into this other account and take out?

If I can’t do anything, well then I’ve gotta re, I’ve gotta reconfigure things. Whether it’s taking the short term to long term or a midterm, or selling, maybe you have a stinker property. You thought was great on paper, but then now you’re actually in the business and you have the competition. Maybe you’re a couple years into it, it’s like maybe it’s not doing so well for you.

Or maybe you do refinance it if you have any equity, so that way you don’t get the tax hit and you do a different exit strategy at that point. But this is where it needs to give you that clarity. And a lot of people just don’t have that, Tim. So that’s where I would tell people. This is that system that will help you make better decisions in your business.

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this one, but I was at a mastermind one time and the guy stood up there and he said, if you’re constantly fighting fires in your business, you’re the arsonist. And he said that, and I was like, oh my gosh, that that hits home. Because if you’re constantly running outta money or you’re constantly upside down, we need to do fire prevention versus, you know, like where we’re actively fighting the fires.

And that’s what this system does. It helps you to move from a fire. Fighter to a fire preventer, more like the fire marshal versus the frontline firefighter in your own business because you put one out usually and then another one sprains up and you put one out over there and it s springs up. Well, if the root causes, you have a leak at the foundation and like there’s gas lines and they just keep, you know, the flames keep popping up.

Mm-hmm. Well then we gotta take care of that. And that’s what I believe Tim, this system helps to solve is a lot of those root issues because you always follow the money. Follow the money. Like, okay, if we’re not making enough, we gotta do something different. But all, like you had mentioned before too, a lot of people just don’t have that clarity to know if they’re upside down or not.

Yeah. Yeah. Great points and I love it. You know, start starting with the profit. Um, the good news with our industry, you know, on one side it is complex because there’s way other, you know Yeah. Much more types of expenses, but there’s also much more types of income. Yes. And so there usually is a lot of opportunity for basically everyone out there to really find some of those leaks and move some things around to.

To, to create more profit, you know, whether it’s reconsidering how they’re managing the property, uh, maybe they bring it in-house. Yeah. You know, maybe they’re, they make some changes with their, um, their housekeeping or their supplies or, you know, they work on their, their revenue management strategies. So, okay.

So starting with profit first. Um. I love that. W what would be like the next step? Someone’s like, okay, I, I took a look. I’ve got this account set up and I’m putting 5% in each month. Where, where do I go from here? Well, first of all, you’re building great habits, so I would just commend you. ’cause a lot of people, you know, just they have never taken that step before.

I would also say another key thing you could do immediately that might put money in your pocket that you’re constantly shoveling out the door and you don’t even know it is doing a very simple exercise. To go over everything that’s going out the door. I call it the PR and U exercise from Profit First.

I think it’s in my book as well too, where you mark, you just print out your expenses for like the last two or three months in Airbnb or like short-term rentals or everything that’s going on there. That might be a lot. So like it might only be one to two months that you print out, but you mark every single thing that’s going out the door.

Is it p, R or U? Is it profitable? Like is this something that’s actually either making me money or saving me time? Would be replaceable. Like you had said, Tim, this might be in-house management versus external management. Like what if I replace that? What would that replacement cost be and what would the savings be, and what would the time investment be?

So it’d be like, okay, if I have these things that I’m purchasing, what if I replaced them? How much could I either save or save my trouble? And then you is unnecessary. So you would be like, why am I paying for this? Or the subscriptions that you never really use, or those types of things, or. This is if you start to get a bigger team.

That, you know, you might have someone that is a good culture fit or something like that, but then they don’t, they’re not producing and that’s really hard because usually the two biggest expenses in a business is marketing and payroll. And that’s where looking at your returns on ad and spend or however you’re getting, you know, the leads in the door.

Is a big one. And the other one is, okay, what are the people that are on the team? Is everyone pulling their weight? Especially in lean times. You gotta make sure you’re as lean and mean as possible. So that’s where going through this exercise and having an actual step-by-step process, go through, print it off.

P-R-N-U-P is obviously the things you’re gonna keep. It’s profitable to you. R is what you can look at to try and replace or remove or, you know, like to move to something else. And then you would just be, I gotta cut this. Why do I still have this? We, we’ve done this exercise so many times with the people that we work with, Tim, and like on average it’s at least a thousand a month.

People are cutting, you know, like they’re mm-hmm. They just have a thousand dollars of waste laying around. We’ve got some crazy stories with some bigger investors where they cut like 50,000 a month and I’m like, this is nuts. You know? And a lot of times they just never had a system to go through this.

Mm-hmm. So number one, I’d set yourself up for profitability. By making sure that every dollar that comes in goes to at least another account that gives you some profit and gives you a system. Then from there, I’d be like, okay, now that’s kinda like offense where a dollar comes in and I want to make sure that we’re offensively taking this and making sure that we have dry powder.

On the flip side, it’s like, let’s also make sure that we have as much coming in and going to our pocket and going to the bottom line as possible, and having an exercise like that would be another great step to take. Yeah. Awesome. Okay. PRU is it, is it profitable in terms of time or money? Time. Time is a big one also.

Mm-hmm. Is it replaceable or is it unnecessary? Uh, so basically we start paying ourselves. We look at all of our transactions, we identify if they fit in that PRU system. Um. One of the challenges with our industry is that there just are a lot of transactions there, there, and they come in from a whole bunch of different places.

So I know, you know, fortunately, like with AI today, like you can grab a whole bunch of transactions and give it to Claude or Yeah, a chat GPT and it, it can help out. But do you have any recommendations, uh, just on the structure, like setting these up with, you know, maybe a FinTech bank or something like that, that, that makes some of these, these structural pieces easier?

There’s actually banks out there that are like Profit First friendly. There’s a couple ones like relay fi.com. They’re Profit First base where they’ll let you set up, I think 20 accounts for free. So you can name those accounts. You can also do automatic transfers, so like when you get income in, you could set it on certain days of the week or certain days of the month, and it’ll transfer into the accounts that you want to either by percentage or by an actual dollar amount.

So that’s one of ’em. Another one’s base Lane. Com, which is more built for, I believe, the rental industry. So if you’re a buy and hold investor, then that’s another one to look into. Base lane.com. So yes, there’s a couple of them out there, Tim. There’s a couple others that we use internally as well. So those are just a couple of ones that are, um, they go out there and they are actual profit first type banks that help you set up multiple accounts and don’t have a bunch of fees attached to them, and you can do all the transfers that necessary.

And they even help you with some of that automation too. Yeah. And some of ’em even pay you interest. Yes, exactly. Uh, you know, much more than like a brick and mortar bank like Wells Fargo. So, uh, I would check those out. I think we’ve recommended baseline on the show before we, uh, we use Mercury for our business, which is also another FinTech bank.

I mean, we can literally create a new account in like one second. Yeah. Uh, we can issue, uh, digital credit cards with limits and um, so they have some really good options as well, so. Okay. Um. What’s left after the PRU stage? David, where, where does someone go from there? Or if you have, have five to 10 rentals?

No, I, well, there’s there. I mean, I could tell you all the steps to the end of time here, but another great thing if you don’t have it in place currently is getting someone on your team that understands real estate. Like a good bookkeeper or a good accountant or a good, you know, if you need higher level help, uh, like a part-time CFO or something, making sure that the people on your team understand your industry.

’cause that’s one of the biggest mistakes I see people make, is that they link up with someone that’s cheap or overseas and they don’t understand. Real estate investing, especially if you’ve got a short-term rental with about a thousand transactions coming in and out and you, they’re not sure, okay, where do I classify this?

What do I do? Or if you ever purchase a long-term or short-term rental or if you’re just doing it even a flip or a project or if like you’ve bought one and it needs work and you’re doing that, it’s like, where do all those transactions go? You do not want to go to at tax time or like down the road and say all this is wrong.

You not, didn’t really have the clarity. ’cause that’s part of being a. Good business owner as well too, is not only knowing where your cash is going, but knowing what your numbers are telling you so you can grow the business like you want to. And a lot of people just don’t have the right people in place that are really helping them because either, number one, they don’t know real estate, or number two, they might do the transaction, but they’re not meeting with you on a regular basis to be like, okay.

What’s going on? Here’s something that I see. Here’s something that you could do that type of thing as well too. So you need to make sure you have some good people in your corner that actually understand your industry, and that will at least give you the time of day that will have some type of meeting schedule to go over the numbers because.

The $10, $20 per hour task is like the data entry, right? But like the a thousand dollars per hour task is taking that data and analyzing it and saying, what can I do with this? You know, so, so that way you could have better PRU conversations. That way you could have better cash conversations that way. You could say, okay, where do I need to put the money to grow this thing if I’m, if I have five to 10 now, how do I double to 20?

Doors and make sure that I don’t go crazy and don’t have too much things going this way that way. So this is where a lot of people forget that the financial side as you grow, should grow with you. So if you’ve got a bookkeeper, make sure they’re real estate investing. If you’ve got a good real estate investing, then the next step is like, okay, do you have a leader helping you get to that next stage and make sure you’re still profitable?

It’s like making sure your finances grow with the rest of the business. A lot of people, usually that’s the last area. That they worry about. It’s like, well, let me get the deals, the marketing, the operations, which is great. You gotta get all that front end stuff, but just don’t forget the backend because at the end of the day, we all want financial freedom.

And if you don’t have the financial systems to grow while you grow, you’re gonna say, oh shoot, where did all that money grow? What is going on here? So that would just be the next thing, and making sure you have the right people in your corner team. Yeah, no, great point. Um, I’ve recommend recommended a book, uh, a lot of times called Who Not How.

Oh, yeah. I think it’s, I think it’s by Dan Sullivan and Yep. You know, one of the things they talk about is if you’re, if you’re procrastinating in something and maybe that is organizing your finances, it’s probably because you either don’t like it or you’re not good at it. Right. But there’s someone out there that is good at it, uh, and that does like it.

Um, and so yeah, who not how, you know, if, if you’re in that position, you got a bunch of deals coming in and, and you have no idea what the numbers actually look like? Uh, probably, probably time to get some help. Um. Do you have any tips, David, though? I, you know, we’ve got a big range of listeners, uh, yeah. On this show.

Some people that are just getting started, some people that have really large portfolios, and I know some of the people that are just getting started are thinking, oh gosh, I, you know, I can’t afford to, to bring someone in and I want to do this myself. Uh, and I can imagine a lot of people get in and, and they maybe get this set up.

But then it falls apart like two months later. You know, one of the nice things with the automatic transfers is that it just happens automatically. Right. But, uh, do you have any other tips or suggestions for someone out there that’s like gonna try this on their own? They’re just getting started and how to.

To keep consistent with it. Yeah, so automate it as much as possible. So if you are going to start profit first, that’s the nice thing about starting there, is you don’t need to be a financial wizard. You don’t even know how to use spreadsheets. Like you don’t even know how need to know that stuff. All you need is to set up the bank accounts, and especially if you set it up at a bank that does the automatic transfers, a lot of that can happen automatically.

Okay. You get your first deal under your belt. You’ve got all the money, you’ve got, you start to get rental income, you know, or the short term income coming in. Okay. It hits your account and then by a certain day, whether it’s Friday or the 15th of the month or whatever it might be, it then transfers by how much you want to into those accounts.

And I would start with what the most you can do, what’s the most you can do to keep. You afloat and to keep the business afloat. Is it 50 50? Is it, you know, a split percentages? That’s why I would also recommend picking up the book. You know, if, just a shameless plug there, if you want more guidance. ’cause in there I just give you like the 1, 2, 3, here’s how you do this, here’s how you get where you want to with profit first.

But the best thing, Tim, is for them to be consistent. So make it as foolproof as possible by setting it up at a bank that allows the automatic transfers and you could just have it done automatically and then. From there, if you need help with the numbers and stuff, bookkeepers really even, even in the real estate industry, are still pretty cost effective.

So if you need someone like that, that would be one of the best First hires is either an assistant that can also do the books or an actual bookkeeper, but as long they have to have real estate investing knowledge. So getting someone to help with that side because you don’t wanna go to tax time and be like, ah, shoot.

You know, here we go again. Now I’ve gotta get all the receipts and all the things for the last year and I don’t remember what this was from, you know, a year ago. You know, that type of thing. You just want your future self will. Thank you. If you set some of these up right at the beginning and. Even if you’re at the beginning, profit first can be put on automatic.

The other parts, the parts that are the financial end. Unless you are just inclined to the numbers and the spreadsheets and that type of thing, you’re either gonna need to get someone to help you or just run a very simple spreadsheet or something. Can you just do all your transactions in and out for the month, or at least download your bank statements, you know, once a month.

So that way you can put it, you know, like for your account to do when you first file your taxes. But that’s what I would say first. Tim is profit first can be almost automated as much as possible. If you put some of these key pieces in place and just start with what you can do, then you just put it on autopilot.

So when money gets deposited, you know it’s gonna transfer on those specific days. Good points, and we wanna make sure everyone knows how to, to get in touch with you, find your book. Yeah. Uh, but just one other question as we, we kind of wrap up. So, um, we’ve already identified, we know, I mean, I know talking with managers and owners, investors, basically every day, like this is one of the areas in the short term rental industry where people just leave it.

In the back, you know? Yeah, for sure. And they don’t really look at it. And, and part of the reason is because it’s complicated. Uh, and so there are some, some accounting programs that have popped up specifically for short-term rentals. So we kind of have several pieces here, right? Like we, we need to get some structure in place to make it easier, you know, to facilitate automatic, automatic.

Transfers, things like that. We need to get a system like, or your system in place. Uh, but then there is the backend piece too, you know, like the actual accounting. And a lot of people use QuickBooks. So I’m curious, is that what you find most people are using still as QuickBooks? For smaller, smaller operators, it’s still the, yeah, even small operators, it’s still the elephant in the room at this point.

No one’s come to dethroned them. We’ve got a couple people using other softwares like Zero or FreshBooks or that type of thing. But yeah, I would say out of our clients it’s like 98% and there’s not many people on other things, but. If you have a system like that, the nice thing about a system like that, or any of the ones that I just mentioned there, a lot of ’em have automatic functionality where you can literally set up your bank account to sync with QuickBooks.

So at least, even if you don’t know where to put ’em, because you’re not an account and you don’t know how to, you know, categorize the all the transactions, you can at least pull all the transactions in for the month. So that way, even if you had a thought like you were doing a lot at. Transactions. You could still have everything there so nothing gets missed.

That’s the biggest thing, Tim is like, you just don’t want anything missed. So a system like that really helps you catch everything versus the manual entries or ledgers or spreadsheets, things like that. Yeah. There’s a, another one that I started using, I don’t know, maybe a year or so ago, called Monarch. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, this?

Oh yeah, I’ve heard of Monarch. Yep. Yeah, monarch’s great. For anyone out there that is unorganized still and you got a bunch of accounts in a bunch of different places, uh, that can help you centralize. Never really low, you know, annual fee. Uh, and it’s a place where you could organize all those expenses so you could export them and go through the process and making sure that you’re profitable and identifying your transactions.

Yeah. Um. Awesome, David. Well, uh, you have a podcast. Uh, tell us about your podcast and your book and how people can get in touch with you. Well, there’s one site you could go to for all that simple cfo.com, simple, CFO, like chief financial officer.com. That’s where we have a podcast page, that’s where we have the link to the book.

The book is on Amazon, so if you want the physical book, you could get it there. I think we even give a downloadable version of the book on the site as well too. Like you could get the free book at our website. Uh, you could also book a call with our team there if you’re like, Hey, I’m running around like a chicken with my head cut off and I need some help getting this under control.

We have different services like the bookkeeping or the fractional CFO or the CPA things for real estate investors specifically, we work in the short-term long-term space. So if you need that, that’s at simple cfo.com. Kinda your OneStop shop for all things profit first for real estate investing. Awesome.

Well, uh, appreciate you coming on, David. What you do is, uh, super important. I mean, if if people aren’t staying above water, then, then, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s not a good ending. Right, exactly. So really important, uh, appreciate you coming on and, and thanks for all the advice. Thank you, Tim. Take care.

If you’ve been tuning into the show for a while, will you know that I’ve been investing in a project in meting Columbia, been building a boutique hotel resort for the last three years, and I’ve been teasing at some of the details.

Well, today I want to give you some insights, pull back the curtain and talk about some of the opportunities and some of the risks. ’cause I’ll tell you, it has not been a smooth ride. But there is light at the end of the tunnel.

So for any of you considering a new construction project or considering investing in a foreign country, well, stay tuned and welcome back to the short-term Real Richest podcast.

Well, you know what they say no risk, no reward, right? Well, I don’t think it’s any different. For a foreigner investing in another country, especially on a new construction project. So today we’re talking about my boutique hotel resort project in Meine Columbia that I’m currently building with a partner.

I am excited to say that we’re very close to launching the first units, but it has not been without a lot of struggles.

Lemme start off with the pros, the reasons why this project was appealing. First of all, I’m no stranger to Columbia. I’ve been going there for the last 10 years. I purchased my first property there back in 2017, where I lived pretty much year round for several years.

A lot of things have changed since then, and I now spend most of my time in Brazil, actually. And so this project is happening from a distance. But we do have a really good team on the ground. So some of the pros that attract, I mean, first of all, I was familiar with this area. I knew all of the market because I’m a real estate guy and I can’t help just understanding the local real estate markets, especially where I’m living.

And so I did see a lot of opportunity.One of the things that has been obvious is the amount of tourism coming into Columbia. Millions and millions of tourists are coming into Columbia and specifically ine each and every year. A lot of them from the us, a lot from Canada, a lot from Europe. You name it all over the world, people are showing up in Columbia because it’s a beautiful country and there are beautiful people there, And the cost of living for most of you, living outside of South America is considerably lower

Well. If you’re a US citizen, like most of our audiences, although we do have listeners in over 125 countries, so want to thank all of you for tuning in over the years. It’s been a fun journey. Uh, it’s definitely had its ups and downs and we’ve learned a ton, but we’re sticking with it and we know that professional operators in this space will continue to prevail and that there’s a lot of opportunity left.

So that’s the first thing. This market has more people visiting it each and every year, and it’s been like that since the last 10 years where I’ve personally been visiting the property now as a US citizen that earns most of my money in US dollars. The US dollar has also been at an all time high over the last few years.

Yes, over the last year. It’s come down considerably. And this is one of the risks with investing internationally.

But while your dollar is high, that means that if you’re buying construction materials in Columbia, for example, that it’s actually costing you less because they’re not adjusting their materials based off what the dollar’s valued at. Right? It also means that labor costs are less, even though labor costs are drastically lower in South America than they are in the us.

Another one of the reasons why I got excited about this project.

So strong demand, strong dollar and strong revenue potential because these short term rentals we’re building 20 are going to be rented to foreigners that are used to paying in dollars. So we’re actually able to build in Colombian pesos construction materials and run our operation using Colombian pesos, But many times receive reservations priced in American dollar prices.

But before we get into too many more details, let me start off by saying that I would not recommend an international investment for someone, first of all, that isn’t familiar with the country, that doesn’t speak the language, and that doesn’t have a local team to help accomplish the project that you’re set out to do.

I have a partner on this project. He’s lived in Meine for, gosh, I don’t know, 12, 15 years. He’s already worked with the same architect that’s building our project, and our architects also built other successful projects in the past, which I’ve personally visited. And so I had a lot of trust going into this deal before I got started.

If I didn’t have that team on the ground and I didn’t live in the area, well, I definitely wouldn’t have ventured out on this project

I know for a fact that my favorite thing in life is not to manage. A construction project. Uh, and so luckily we had a great person on our team that’s been helping us and has helped us through these last three years.

As I record this today, several years later, the US dollar has gotten considerably weaker. I did a podcast episode, actually, if you go way back to episode 79, where I purchased a property in Brazil. That was almost about five years ago, and that was at that time the highest exchange rate between the US dollar and the Brazilian real almost in history.

So I really lucked out with that one, and I’m happy to say that project has gone really well. That’s a property where I personally stay a good part of the year, and that city BA has grown to be the highest cost per square meter in all of Brazil.

So I really lucked out with that one. Of course, I don’t earn money back on appreciation unless I actually sell the property. Right, and I’m still living in it. But it does create some more opportunities, so just keep that in mind. The opportunity to have the exchange on your side can also go the other way.

So if you’re interested in purchasing a property internationally, you can go back and check out episode 79. I talk about a lot of the basic, fundamental things that you’ll want to keep in mind when looking for a property, working with a lawyer. All those sorts of fun things. But for today, let’s get back into the Metagene project, and I wanna talk about the supply and demand because just as all of the tourism has been growing really rapidly in Metagene, it’s also attracted investors.

And so we have new hotels entering the city at an incredible pace. There are literally thousands of units being added to Metagene for short-term rental approved buildings. And now if I rewind back three years ago, this was not as prevalent and the regulations were also ticking up. So a lot of properties in the area were getting pulled off the market.

So just as we’ve seen all across the US, as supply goes up. Well, if demand is not keeping up, if there’s more options, then prices go down.

So we always gotta keep an eye on supply and demand, and if it’s a new construction project with a really long timeline. You need to be prepared for that now, I feel really lucky because this project, this boutique resort, is very unique. It’s not a traditional hotel style setup. It’s not a tall building.

Actually, there’s three different designs on this lot. So the, the lot itself is a hectare, which is a little over two acres, and it’s situated right on the side of the mountain with a beautiful view of the city, 20 minutes or so from the airport, but also a quick Uber ride to some of the areas best restaurants and most trendy neighborhoods.

For those of you catching the video, we’ll make sure to put lots of images and videos of our progress and the construction over these last few years in the background so that you can follow along.

So this project is unique for multiple reasons. The location for sure is unlike most locations in all the city, you get the peace and tranquility while being basically in the city, and that is not very common.

The other thing is the actual design. And so our architect has done an amazing job. He brings a lot of nature elements into the project, and I observed this in his last project. For any of you that have maybe visited Meine, he built a beautiful project called Bosco out in Guap pe.

That’s this place that has all these beautiful lakes. And a lot of people visit when they come to Metagene for the first time. So I, I’ve seen his work before. And he’s brought that to our project as well. And so for our first phase of rental units, they’re sort of like cabanas, but they’re luxurious. They have kitchens, they have laundry, they all have jacuzzis overlooking the city.

And this is a type of property that really just can’t find

and so while there’s lots of supply coming onto the market, I do feel very confident that these properties are gonna do well because, and we talk about this all the time on this channel, and they’re going to stand out.

Now, getting these first eight units up, which are almost complete now, almost three years later was not that easy. There was a lot of struggles along the way. In fact, when we first bought the lot, which was about 3.25 billion pesos, and before you go out screaming and saying, Tim, this sounds absurd.

Billions of pesos. That’s not as much as you think. Yes, it’s still quite a lot. Depends on the exchange rate, but roughly $800,000 for these two acres. Remember, this lot is in town. It’s in a prime location, so it is likely more expensive than you were imagining.

And while I do know that I am an expert at all things short-term rentals, I’ve literally lived and breathed short-term rentals with my portfolio and taught about it on the show for over a decade. I don’t have an exact number of how well these properties are going to do because they are unique and because supply is changing every month.

So if you were to look up Air DNA, yes, it’s helpful. It gives you some good insight. But what we’ve done is basically come up with a range, and I expect these properties to rent anywhere from 150 to $350 a night. Obviously, that’s a big range. And so if you’ve got a project out there with a big range like that, you need to be comfortable with the conservative side, the $150, in which case we are with this project.

Now, there was a lot of infrastructure that went into this project. There was no sewer, there was no water, there was no electrical. And to go through the permit process and the licensing, we had lots of hiccups because this was a agricultural lot zoned commercially. We purchased it with an existing license.

Hoping to modify the license. That’s what we were told. And long story short, we weren’t able to do that and it took us about 18 months to get a new license. And so again, just like in the US new construction projects can take a really long time before you even start building because of the planning, because of the infrastructure and that infrastructure is also costly.

So at this stage of the game, we’ve got almost eight units built. We have an entrance building, which is very lovely. It’ll have a 24 hour security person. It’ll have reception, it has backup electrical. It has a spot for our it, it has a laundry facility. We have eight cabanas up and we have the infrastructure for the whole lot.

And we’re into the project almost about $2 million. Now, of course, the, the exchange rate has been fluctuating over the last few years,

but up until now we have had zero return. So you better believe, I’m excited to get these first units up and going. If we look at the cost of the actual units themself. They’re around $65,000. Now, you’ll see in the photos, these are unique properties, and if they rent for on average $200 a night at maybe a 65% occupancy, these eight units should bring in almost around $400,000 a year.

That is, of course, before expenses, but remember, labor in South America is a lot cheaper, so we’re really just looking at electricity, utilities, and some light supplies. 

Now, because of all the infrastructure, the time this took, the licensing, if you look at those numbers today, and mind you, this is all cash because as a foreigner it’s not very easy to get a loan outside of your. Your home country, if you look at those returns right now, they’re not that great, but they could be as much as 20% per year.

And again, that is not considering a loan. So if we were able to leverage the project. That return would go much higher. Now, where our opportunity lies is that we already have the licensing. We already have the infrastructure for 12 more units. So you can see our potential return can go up massively from here.

Now, a cool thing about this lot as well is that we have it licensed for a restaurant, and I am not a restaurant entrepreneur. I don’t know much about restaurants at all, but fortunately. I do have a partner that already has a restaurant, and I’m excited for him to bring in his expertise and for me and our team to bring in our expertise on the operations.

If you’re new to the show and you’re looking for help operating your property, well, my team and I have managed properties in over 40 cities and yes, in various countries. You can check us out@triches.com or our company website, which is corley, C-O-R-Z-L y.com. There’s a partner with us button up there.

We’d love to schedule. Quick call, see if your property makes for a good fit with our team.

Okay. So those are the basic numbers. There’s a lot of opportunity for this property. It is truly unique. And so I’ll be reporting back maybe in another six, nine months, let you know how these first units are going and how the new construction is coming along.

I don’t wanna say any of this has been easy though, even really intimately knowing the city and being a real estate guy, this has taken much longer than anticipated. So a few words of wisdom for you out there if you’re considering a new construction project. Well. Make sure that you’ve got the budget for it or you have options, and understand that the timelines could take much, much longer.

So really take a hard look at that project and ask yourself, if this took a year or two years, or three years longer than I anticipated, would I still be interested in the project?

Would I still see the opportunity?

The other thing to keep in mind, if it is an international property, do you plan on spending a lot of time there? Because a project like this does require some involvement, right? It’s not like you can just pop up a 20 unit hotel and be off to the races.

All right, so there you have it. There are some insider details. Yes, the project’s taken longer than expected, but it is turning out very nicely. It is truly unique.

You wanna stay in the property or have someone that you trust stay at the property and work out the kinks. I know for sure there were a lot of kinks that we’re still working out with these units. After having stayed in them. So stay tuned. In the near future, we’ll come back with the numbers and yes, where there is a lot of risk, there can also be a lot of reward.

It’s a little too early to say, but I’ve got my fingers crossed and I’m staying positive, and I think this project is gonna be a really, really amazing project for the long run. Until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week. 

Well, welcome back everyone to the short-term Rental Riches podcast. I’m happy to be seated here virtually with yet another founder, a tech founder, uh, and a company we actually personally use in our portfolio. Uh, today we’ve got Thomas t Wald with us, and he is the co and founder of Charge Automation.

Welcome to the show, Thomas. Thank you. Thank you, Tim. And, uh, thank you for supporting Charge Automation, trusting in charge automation being a customer. So happy to hear that. Yeah. Yeah. And we’ve been happy. I know, uh, we’ve given you a few shout outs, uh, on the podcast Before, you know, the, the podcast is really just about how we’ve been operating our personal portfolio and growing and, you know, changing with the times.

And technology is one of those pieces that’s always changing, especially today. I mean, it’s at like warp speed. Um, but would love to hear a little bit about your background and, and, and how you got to be where you’re today. Um, so I think my background is very similar to a lot of people, how they end up in this industry.

Uh, almost accidental when I’ve discovered that, um, you know, um, renting a property short term is way more profitable than long term. Um, I used to be a real estate agent prior to that, so I’ve had some, uh, property and real estate experience and this is, um, way back in 2011. So Airbnb was just a year or two years old, so it was new industry.

Most people didn’t understand or they have never heard of Airbnb, the word. Um, and I, um, had some investment properties that I started doing short-term rental on, uh, quite early. And once I kinda discovered that it was a good profitable, um. Business. I scaled it up, um, doing, uh, rent arbitrage model. Um, and we’ve scaled to as much as, uh, 200 properties, um, very rapidly.

Um, and would scale comes, uh, bottlenecks and processes and the, the disadvantage that we have as property managers. Is that we don’t, we’re not like hotels where we have everything in one building. We have scattered, um, locations. So you can’t meet all your guests all at once when they’re checking in, uh, or different times of the day.

It’s just not scalable. And one of the biggest challenges that, uh, we were having at the time, um, was Airbnb was growing, but um, booking.com was already established and I was, I put my properties on booking.com, um, and we start getting a lot of reservations. So unlike Airbnb, but with booking com, you do have to process the guest credit card yourself.

Mm-hmm. Um, so. Uh, that I, and with pushing the credit card also comes a lot of, uh, frauds and chargebacks, things that you’re not really exposed to, uh, primary with, uh, Airbnb. Right. And given that I’m a software engineer by education, I built a, a tool to help me, uh, collect the payment automatically for my guests, and at the same time do an extra authentication verification process when collecting the payment.

Um, and that kind of eliminated our fraud chargeback. And we, we literally, and at scale, we were doing about $20,000 that we’re losing chargebacks, uh, a year. Wow. And it literally went down to, to, to zero. Um, and we’ve added a little more, um, you know, guest verification process along the way. So that kind of reduced a lot of our issues that we’re having with our guests and frauds.

Um, and that was pretty much the beginning. Um, and when other hosts in the community kind of discovered about my tool that was having the same issue, Hey, you know, can I use your, your, your, your software? Uh, ’cause I’ll have the same issue. And funny enough as, uh, our first client or person that reached out to me was all the way from Australia.

Uh, I’m in Canada. Mm-hmm. And they had 600 properties. And far was the biggest issue, uh, they had and they said, I want your software like yesterday. Um mm-hmm. So there a bit of modification for them to be able to use it. And we did that. Um, and the revenue, you know, from that customer was about 10,000 a month.

Um mm-hmm. Which was pretty, uh, exciting. And I, I realized that, okay, there’s something here that people need and want. Um, and I start really to focus on the software component of it building, you know, there. What started as a payments and verification component that, but then, um, the customers start saying, Hey, since you already have the credit card on file, since you already have, you know, doing all these things, can I also have ability to sell extra services?

Like, you know, airport pickup, uh, early check in, late checkout services. Um, and then we’ve added that component. And then they say, Hey, you’re already doing this. Can I also ask them a little more questions about why they come into my property before they arrive? Then we added ability to add some custom questions as a part of the check-in process, and then they said, okay, you’ve got all of this.

It’s amazing. But once they do all of that, can I have like a guidebook where they can read the checking instruction and get the access code, and then we added a guest portal or guidebook. And there was no definition of what we’re building at the time was brand new, but it is what’s known as right now, guest experience software.

So we kind of built it accidental, but also, you know, uh, product led growth where our customers are requesting, um, for, for, you know, what, what they want software to be. And, and they built it. And this is what it is now. It’s a full guest experience solution that handles everything from checking to checkout once the guest makes a reservation.

Yeah, exactly. And so yeah, you built it first for your own portfolio, solved some problems. Uh, obviously lots of other people in the industry have the same problems and now here you are, you’re a software company. Exactly. It is software company. So yeah. Such a long answer for short question, but yeah. No, but, but your guys’ tool really does a great job at, you know, facilitating all of that.

Um, and you mentioned, you know, one of the big things, chargebacks and maybe, you know, for the operators out there that are just getting started or they maybe have one or two properties and haven’t made it onto booking.com, or they haven’t made it onto these direct booking platforms where we always take the payments.

Maybe chargebacks doesn’t seem like a big thing, but once you get to that stage and if you’re planning on growing your portfolio, I mean, they are. Dramatic. You know, someone stays at your property and essentially the chargeback is they go to the credit card company and say, Hey, this was fraudulent, or whatever.

They dispute the charge and the credit card co company gives ’em the money back and you’re out. You, you had someone stay at your property potentially, and uh, they stayed there for free, so. It is a massive Im, it, it’s, it makes a massive impact. It is, and I, I mean, I’ve had many, many stories. Um, and it’s not just a chargeback.

I mean, that’s one component of it. So one is obviously the guests, uh, you know, stayed enjoy their estate and then they filed a chargeback. Now you lost our money. But then typically those kind of guests are also trouble. So they will smoke in the unit, right? They’ll throw a part in the unit. They will, they will, yeah.

Destroy the place. Um, so your cost is not even the chargeback, it’s the whole process. And you have to block the property for a certain period of time. You’ve gotta cancel the next booking. It is extremely painful. Um, so if you can prevent it, uh, prevent it. And most people think that if I can just, um, have all the evidence, I have pictures that this person stated in my.

Property, I’m gonna win this chargeback. Um, unfortunately, you know, 99% of the times you don’t win those chargebacks. Um, right. And they’re fraud. It’s a hundred percent you don’t win. So, um, it’s better to avoid than trying to win it back. Right, right. Exactly. Yeah. They often are not sure most favorite guests.

Yeah. So having that go guest authentication upfront, uh, really goes a long way. Mm-hmm. Um. Let’s see here. So where do we wanna take this next? I know there’s a lot of different ways we can go. Uh, chargebacks is definitely a big one. Um, you know, payment gateways and sort of automating that. I think the reality is, is that the.

There isn’t unfortunately a single tool out there that does everything perfectly or everything in the most efficient way. Uh, and so one of the reasons we came to charge automation also is for your just payment gateway, um, you know, to have a, a more reasonable fee for processing charge, uh, charges with Stripe.

Can, can you talk about kind of what that payment gateway is for those of our audience? Probably don’t know. Yeah. I’m glad you touched on that point. So. I think most, uh, PMSs typically support one or two payment processors, usually Stripe plus somebody else. Um, and. If you’re using Stripe, obviously you could use charge automation to be able to be able to collect the payment and avoid fraud chargebacks, um, and save some fee along the way.

Uh mm-hmm. But let’s say you are in a country where Stripe is not operating or you’re in a country where, uh, you know where Stripe has banned the, or, you know, close your account for whatever reason that may be. So now you’re stuck. Now you, you need to work with another payment processor, but the problem is that does that payment processor that you want to work with does not work with your PMS.

And this is almost accidental also how we we, how we got into this Because the customer came to us and said, Hey, Stripe closed my account. Here’s the payment processor I want to use. Here’s the PMs I want to use. You know, can you do this for me? Connect. Connect this two. And then we’ve pretty much been able to integrate that new payment processor where we connect the PMS and the payment processor with the bridge and the logic in there.

Um, yeah. And pretty much every customer that came in requested for another one and for another one, and for another one, before we know it, we have over 120 payment processor integrations. So now anybody from any PMS can use pretty much any payment processor in the globe, um, which is wow. Uh, like I said, it’s accidental, but it opens a lot of, um, opportunity for people to be able to choose the PMs they want to use and the payment process they want to use without having to compromise either one of them.

Yeah. That’s amazing. Wow. So you guys work with 130 payment processors? Yes. Under 30 plus now at the stage. Wow. That, that seems like a lot to keep track of. Uh, I’m sure some of them are more commonly used than others, but how, how do you guys manage all of that? You know, it, it, it’s when you’re building it, you don’t realize it.

And then when we have to maintain, update the APIs and changes, it’s really, it becomes, um, a handful I would say. Um, and we’ve kind of, I mean, after building so many, you, you do have a process. And some of them are just one-offs. ’cause, you know, one customer with a large number of portfolio properties wants to use it and some of them are like concentrated where a lot of people use it in certain countries.

Yeah. Um, so, um, we, we don’t keep and maintain all of them. We, we see that the activity, the usage, and there, there’s still customers using it. Then we continue to, to make updates. But some of them customers don’t use them anymore. They just, you know, staying there. So those ones we just kind of. Keep them, um, off the shelf until a customer wants to use it, then we may have to, you know, update some of their content.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. Well, most of our audience is in the US and most of the short-term rental operators, owners, investors are using Stripe. Curious to hear from you. What are maybe like the top three payment processors that you see out there in terms of functionality, flexibility, and, and maybe pricing, you know, what are the best ones?

Well, I would say. I think, like I said, Stripe is a default one because it’s, it’s already available in the PMS. It is the easiest one to get an account with. Um, but it’s also not the cheapest. Um, so most, most people, um, go with that at the default. But once you scale up and once you start doing. Some serious volume.

Um, then that extra, you know, 1%, that extra half a percent, uh, you’re paying, uh, becomes significant. Uh, when you, when you do the total. And that’s where then people start evaluating. What other options, you know, are there? Um, and this is where, I mean, um, in us, you know, obviously authorize.net is a, you know, a second probably most popular one, um, in the industry.

Uh, but also a lot of like, um, big payment processors, whether it’s Chase Payments, um, or there’s Elon, um, a handful. Um, I mean, a quick Google search will probably give you those ones, but, uh, these are some of the popular ones. Um, that, that, that we work with. And most people usually switch, uh, from Stripe if they, if, if cost saving becomes an important factor.

Mm-hmm. Um, and, and, and we’re the, and we’re the pretty much, I would say, the only company in the industry that’s solving that problem at the moment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the more properties you add and the more direct bookings you do, or the more you know bookings you do outside of Airbnb, or if you’re taking payments directly on booking.com, the, the more important these, these little percentages, uh, become, um, right.

You know, and that’s just another way for us in the industry to be more efficient and to have more net profit. And I think a lot of people out in the industry right now are, there’s a lot of buzz about upsells, you know? Mm-hmm. Uh, I think just because the industry’s gotten so competitive and people are trying to find ways to, you know, squeeze a few extra dollars out.

Uh, but this is one of the things that charge automation does really well. Uh, and helps facilitate. Can you tell us a little bit more about, you know, what you guys have built and, you know, chargebacks in general, or not chargebacks, I’m sorry, but, uh, ourselves. Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a general shift in the industry, uh, because it’s gotten very competitive and now the old school way is, you know, let me maximize, um, my A DR, right?

Um, and average daily rate, right? But I think how you have to think about the new way of thinking is not about, you know, how much you’re making, uh, for that booking, but it’s how much you’re making for that stay. So, so you may be competitive on the rate, but then you have all the additional ancillary revenue opportunities where you maximize that booking.

So that booking might have been a $2,000 booking, but by the end, that stay end up become a $3,000 stay because the guest has spent on a few different I items, so. Mm-hmm. Whereas you might have lost a customer if you had priced your daily rate at very high, but not have any upsells. So it is a competitive strategy and it is, uh, the modern way of competing in, in the, in the competitive SDR industry, uh, even the hotel space.

Um, so having said that, um, that’s where then you wanna see, you wanna optimize your upsells, you know, how do you drive maximum conversion, upsell. And one of the biggest, uh, friction point in upsells is when you present the guests, uh, an opportunity to buy upsells. A, you don’t wanna bombard them with hundreds of upsells or like some third party website where you just load up everything.

It has to be very curated. Um, and then from the curated point of view, once they wanna select, you want to show the credit card that they already use with the reservation on at the same level. So you give the Amazon experience where when they see the payment methods already attached, it becomes a one click up.

So where you just add and complete the payment. Right. But if you ask the guest to pull out their card and enter the numbers again to complete that payment. Now, statistically, uh, and this is a, a data, um, that was on done on research is it’s about, uh, 17% loss when you don’t have the payment method on file in the conversion received.

Yeah, so, so now if you have the card on file, you’re converting 17% more, um, which is, which is huge. So you’re giving the Amazon checkout experience. Um, and then the second part is. D you have guests coming from different parts of the world and they’re used to paying the way they, they pay locally. So you want to give that local payment experience.

So if they’re used to paying by Apple Pay, give them an Apple Pay option. Uh, Google Pay, uh, if they’re from Brazil, let’s say they, they don’t wanna pay by picks if they’re from, um, mm-hmm. Uh, let’s say someplace in Europe, um, like Holland, uh, it’s, they pay by ideal. That’s the way of people have people pay.

So not everybody takes just raw credit card numbers as a way of payment. So adding that, and I can’t remember the conversion, but I think it gives you another seven, 8% better conversion. Um, so, and that’s what we do. We charge automation, is that we give the guest ability to pay. You could be using Stripe, you could be using any payment processor, would give the guests a chance to pay through all.

Preferred payment methods and based on where they are and based on their browsers and location, we’ll load up the payment method that is used by the guest, so he’s more likely to convert and pay that upsell. Uh, and with that, uh, what we looked at is so far our customers are paying, spending over $180 per reservation in additional upsell revenue.

Um, mm-hmm. Uh, which is huge. And if it, you know, so if a property is taking, uh, four or five reservations for the month and you’re already at, at a thousand plus, uh, an upsell income, but all these little optimizations is where you maximize not having, Hey, I have an upsell. I could sell it. But it’s how you sell it.

How you convert it is, is, um, is the most important part and. You know, we’ve spent years and years, you know, optimizing those things and looking at the data and what’s working, what’s not working, AB testing to say this is how customers are converting. So, um, using professional tools is what helps you convert more upsells.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Some excellent points there. I, I know there’s. Just over the years, over the last decade, there’s been so many guidebook options that have come out and, you know, they’re all helpful for the guests and the guests like to see extra information, but removing those steps, basically, you know, making it easier for someone to, to add things on.

I, I think getting the reservation in the first place. Is one thing, you know? And yes, you’ve gotta have competitive pricing and make sure you know, you know what you’re doing with your revenue management, know what your market’s doing. But then it does create a whole bunch of opportunity after you already have someone, and I’m sure, you know, depending on your market, you, you could come up with some data on, you know, how likely it is for people to purchase the airport transfer, how likely it is for people to, to purchase the chef service or whatever it happens to be.

Mm-hmm. Um, to really raise the overall net income. Right. Yes. Uh, go ahead. Yeah. Um, and so, yeah, making that easy is, uh, is a big part. I know before we were with charge automation, we, we tried a lot of different things. You know, the PMSs have their own versions of upsells. Uh, there’s other options out there.

But storing the credit card information, like you said, making it easy goes a long way. Goes a long way. Indeed, indeed. Um, and also, uh, when, uh, people are on vacation or on a business trip, I know they’re not there to read paragraphs of your, your guide or, you know, along information. Um, and the old way of doing it was like, you know, when once a guest books, you know, they will receive five messages, you know, and it will be like, Hey, here’s a link to complete your check-in.

Um, here’s a link to do, uh, ID verification. That’s a separate one. Oh, and if you wanna read our, our, about our, about property, here’s a link for it. Um, and if you wanna buy some services, here’s another link. So now you gimme four or five different links, uh, as a and as a guest, I, I don’t want to think, I just wanna, you know, know, do what I have to do, uh, without much thinking.

So. Of combining all that, you know, fragmented experience for the guests into like one smooth process where they don’t think, they just click, click, click, and, and they’re done with it, uh, is the way. Um, and like I said, the last component of the, the check-in is once they complete that process, they do, I know online checking.

Um, and they pay the secure deposit or the balance. They buy some extra services. Um, and then the last step is, uh, give them access to the guidebook where they can see the information without. Changing the links without going somewhere else. Just keep it in in the same journey. Yeah. Well that’s, it’s a big part of the guest journey.

What you guys have tackled, you know, from payment to, to upsells, to guidebooks. What do you, what’s next for charge automation? I mean, what’s the next big, uh, thing to tackle? Good question. Uh, so, uh, I mean, we have a lot of exciting stuff that, that we’re working on. I can’t just talk about yet. Um, but. In terms of, uh, the product, um, you know, we’ve been at it for quite some time.

Um, you know, I think almost, almost, uh, almost 10 years now. So it is very mature product from that point of view. Um, but at the same time, you know, we are still a company that’s working, like we’re an early startup. Um, we add, um, I think on, in every sprint, which is our sprints about, you know, uh, about a month or so, uh, in every sprint we know we we’re adding about.

50 60 improvements or features, uh, to our product. And it’s changing, uh, drastically, uh, every time. And this, at this point, it’s more, it’s not more one of the big things, but it’s more like on the micro little things that really impact the guest experience. How do you make everything extremely smooth without, you know.

And it’s every, any friction at all. Um, yeah, and it’s just, yeah. So it’s a, it’s a micro fine tuning. Uh, our solution is what we’re focusing on because we’ve tackled all the big important items and then making it to work very seamlessly with your PMS. So, you know, you’re not spending too much time switching tabs.

Everything is, you know, readily available to you. Um, so all this little increments, incremental improvements that we’re doing is our focus.

Yeah. Um, well, I know. Software has just gotten easier to make now, you know what I mean? It’s exciting. We can use AI to help us code and, and do things much faster. I’m not a developer, but, uh, I, I do like technology and I, I try to stay up to date with things. How do you see our industry playing out? As someone who’s been in the software side of things for the last 10 years, knowing that there’s lots of operators out there, especially the larger operators trying to do some of these things in-house, you know, or maybe they’re just like you have done over the last 10 years have have solved one little problem and then that turns into two or three.

How do you see that, uh, changing just the software landscape, I guess, in our industry? Yeah. And this is, this is. Much bigger question. Um, because we literally we’re talking about like, you know, how does, how’s AI gonna change our industry? Um, ’cause that’s how, you know, things have gotten much easier and faster to build.

Um mm-hmm. And what I’ve, I’ve, I’ve noticed is, you know, and we have some customers have also know, built some aspects of our product, uh, you know, in, in house. Um, so what’s gonna happen with, with our industry is that a lot of hosts. Uh, who built their own little product and they wanna expand it. You might be able to do 80% of the work, uh, fairly quickly, but then for the last 20%, for the all the little incremental changes that you’re going to do, uh, that’s where really, you know, where, where it begins.

And the way, the way to give you, um, an example is like if you’re building a house. You can easily just put up the brick, um, you know, or the concrete very easily. Mm-hmm. But now you gotta do the wirings and, uh, you know, the drainage, um, all the little things, you know, the, the tiling and there’s all this extra finishing.

That is gonna take you a lot more time. So they might kind of save money by doing in house, but in the end they would have to hire someone. They have to maintain it. So I don’t think it will become cheaper. They might have the con the you, you might say, you know, I’m gonna take the house and build it, but I don’t think it will be cheaper necessarily.

So it’s not a cost saving strategy. Yeah. Uh, if you have a plan to sell that product to somebody else. Uh, maybe, you know, there’s a bigger picture, but to build it in house. To continue to maintain it. And remember, I mean, there’s also security issue. There is, you know, maintaining servers, um, you know, DevOps, uh, I mean, it’s a much bigger project, right?

Um, that this is so, uh, companies who are doing it, like, you know, again, if you wanna build software tech company, yeah. You know, you can build things, uh, faster and then keep investing. But I look at it from our side, you know, you know, we use AI in all our developments at the stage. And we’re building things there and doing a lot faster, but I cannot see how it would be cost saving for someone to bring it in house.

Yeah. Yeah. Gotcha. Not quite there yet. Yes. Lots of, uh, uh, yeah. Well, awesome, Thomas. Um, let’s see. I’d love to hear you have your own personal portfolio that you’ve had, you mentioned, and that’s kind of where things have started. How do you mind talking about your personal portfolio, just for a few minutes and, and kind of how that’s changed and what you’re doing to, to stay competitive?

Yeah, so. I’m, I’m a user first. Um, and, you know, with my own product, uh, we, we use before things get released to the public, you know, we use my own portfolio product. Uh, and it used to be about 200 post COVID, you know, I went down to, to, uh, about, uh, you know, 80 or so. Um, and we use this as, as a testing ground, uh, for from, for a lot what we built.

And I, I really experienced everything firsthand and everything that we, we built it is to, you know, benefit my operation, which means I know by internal I’m benefiting, um, um, other companies, uh, as well because everyone has the same issue. Uh, and. Also, yeah, I’m at the stage where also I’ve been, I’ve been a host, uh, for about, you know, almost 15 years now, right?

Mm-hmm. Um, and I have a lot of deep, deep experience, uh, in, in the operation. And I, I live it every day, so I. To me, uh, optimizing every single component of, of the journey is, is what’s important. And then maximizing the revenue. Um, and it’s gotten very competitive. It’s got, you know, it has, and I realize it will not get easier.

So now you have to think of creatively how to do this. Um, and, and there’s obviously, I mean, there’s the pricing tools. There is. Uh, know in, in the, in the upsells, how do you want to test it out? You know, does it make sense? And then how much did I make? So I’m doing a lot of this research, uh, internally with, with my own, uh, before, you know, concluding if this is a better way to, to do it.

I don’t know if you, if you have any specific questions about how, how, uh, I’m doing anything else, but, uh, generally, uh. I think what I’m building is, uh, you know, what the product charge automation is, is, uh, this direct outcome of my own operation. Yeah. Well, a lot of good points there. I mean, um, yeah, the industry’s definitely gotten harder and, and returns used to be really good, and now they’re getting smaller and smaller, you know, as more people discovered short-term rentals.

And so we have to learn ways to be more efficient. We have to embrace technology and we have to learn ways to create better guest experiences. Um, and then outside of that, I mean. There’s a supply and demand equation, you know, in a lot of these markets have just seen a lot of supply growth. Um, yes. Mm. And you know, my, my philosophy, uh, in my operation is I don’t trust people.

Um, I trust process. Mm-hmm. Um, because I’ve been through a lot of stuff. People, you know, people get sick, people leave, quit. People do different things. So you can’t build a business around people. Um, there has to be a process whether that person is there or not. Business has to keep going. And I’ve built, um, no, the automation is really, does not rely on a person that doesn’t rely on a person’s knowledge, uh, or experience.

It’s really a process and, uh, and my goal is how do I create a business that, uh, can operate? Whether that person’s here or is not there, and how can I operate it with as little people as possible? Uh, because that saves you money, it saves you headache. And in a competitive space, you know, uh, human labor is the most expensive thing.

And if you can save that, then your, you know, then you can com You can stay competitive in, in this, uh, in this tough, uh, in the competitive industry. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, those are, we share a lot of those same ideas. I mean, that’s our idea behind quarterly is, you know, making things more efficient, using more technology, and, uh, excited to see where you take things with, with your, with your software companies and with your portfolio.

And would love to stay connected. Uh, how can, how can people find you and, uh, what’s the best way to get in touch? Uh, so best way to get in touch, uh, again, we have, uh, again, by email. It’s, uh, thomas@chargeautomation.com is, uh, the best way to reach us or our website, charge automation.com, uh, where you can find, learn about our product as well.

Uh, and I really wanna say yeah, and then thank you for giving us this opportunity. Uh, and, you know, it’s, it’s very, very good end. To see a customer that’s using our, our product. Um, and also, you know, to, to discover that you have a podcast and be part of it is, is quite exciting. So, uh, I would like to say thank you for this as well.

Ah, you’re welcome. Thanks for coming on and, and look forward to staying in touch. Thank you. Cheers. Thanks, Thomas. Bye-Bye.

If your VRBO bookings have been suffering lately, well, VRBO made a pretty big change on the back end that you might not be aware of. Today’s show. We’re gonna break down all the details.

Welcome back to the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast. I’m happy you’re here again. I’ve been traveling around again. I know you probably hear me say that quite a bit, but that’s just been my life over the last few years, and I’m not complaining. Lots of cool places out in this big, beautiful world currently in Florida where I’ve got a new property.

I’m excited to share the details with you. In some upcoming episodes, i’ll be going to another conference later this month, and excited to bring back always the latest and greatest for all of you out there.

Ditch that for, for YouTube.

Let’s go ahead and get right into it. VRBO recently changed their premier host status. This is what you could consider the equivalent of Airbnb’s Superhost status, which we know has a really big impact on your listing visibility.

So what changed? Well, they went from a portfolio wide. Status, meaning if you had more than one VRBO listing you and you achieved the status, it went to your whole portfolio. Well, now it’s just listing specific. So while you don’t get the visibility on the portfolio, you do get it on an individual listing.

Now for those of you out there that have portfolios and are thinking, ah, bummer, I no longer have the status, there’s actually a bright side to it too. Uh, if you have a property that you brought on, and unfortunately it got an early review that wasn’t so great. Before this would’ve removed the status from your whole account, but now it’s still going to give you the status on all of those great properties that deserve it.

So as of January, 2026, these changes are in place and there is a process to make sure that each of your listings qualify. We’re gonna break down exactly what those steps are. There’s actually more than one visibility layer,

And so we’ll get to that in a second as well. I’m gonna go ahead and read off my list here. The core requirements for you to achieve the premier host status, again, on the listing level, not on a portfolio level, are a booking acceptance rate of 99% or more. So yeah, basically every single reservation. You need to be accepting.

Uh, you can’t have any cancellations or the owner initiated cancellation rate has to remain zero. There’s a timeline to when they evaluate you for the status. We’ll get to that in a second. The third core component is an average review rating of 4.6 or higher, so that’s not that hard to achieve, right? In fact, if you have a 4.6 average with your properties, you’re probably not getting a lot of visibility.

You’ve probably got some operational things. Going on or some housekeeping things that you really need to get buttoned up because 4.6 in today’s world doesn’t earn you a lot of money.

The fourth core component, you need at least five reviews on VRBO to qualify. And the fifth one, your property has to have at least five bookings or 60 nights booked. So consider if you have a property that maybe has a week long rental period, you might consider shortening.

Shortening that minimum stay so you can get some more reservations up front, get the status, maintain those good reviews, and then you’ve got this status for the long run versus drying the process out for a long time and maybe earning less on the reservations. Because they had less visibility.

Now, you don’t need to meet each of these five core components every quarter. You don’t need 60 days booked. For example, every quarter VRBO is going to evaluate you every quarter, so every three months. And they’re going to look at the last 12 month period.

So you do need 60 days booked out of the last 12 month period, for example, to make sure that you get the premier host badge.

it’s pretty easy to find out if you have this badge already, if you’re looking at your public listing. Well, if you scroll down where your host badge is. It’s gonna have that status right there for you, but if you’re unsure, just log into VRBO.

You can go to the performance page, and there’s a nice little dashboard there that shows you your premier host. 

 for those of you catching the video version, while you can see the screen share that we’re sharing here in the background, real easy to find out if you’re meeting each of these five co.

Now, good news. For those of you out there that maybe don’t have a lot of reservations coming in from VRBO, there are still some milestones that you can achieve that give you more visibility.

All this information is available online, but we get the behind the scenes look sometimes because we do have an account manager now that we’re managing over 220 properties in over 40 cities. Around the us If you’ve got a property and you’re looking for a little help with it, well our team would love to chat with you.

You can go to str riches.com. There’s a little partner with us button. You’ll find some more information. We can book a time. I’d love to jump on a call with you personally to see if your property makes for a good fit.

So there’s actually three milestones. The first one gives you sort of this good status, whatever that means. It’s a little bit arbitrary, but it’s better than nothing, right? And so if you’ve met some of the core components, you do get a little bit of visibility. The second milestone is actually achieving the premier host status, but there is a third one that gives you extra visibility and you stand out more on the listings.

The way that VRBO displays these isn’t a hundred percent crystal clear, and even coming from our account manager, but for this third milestone, essentially, if you are in the top 1%, well you’re getting much more visibility and you’re going to be standing out.

All right, so let’s talk about some of the benefits. One of ’em I’ve been rattling on about already, and that’s that you get a little bit more visibility, but there are some other benefits. A very big one is that when people search on VR B’s platform, just like they search on Airbnb and filter out Superhost status.

They can now filter out Premier host status. And so if someone’s used to using the platform, they prefer VRBO and they know that they want to stay with a really good quality host and a good property, well, they can simply filter you out if you do not have the premier host status.

Another side benefit is that you do get priority support, and as much as we’d like to think that a hundred percent of all of our guests experiences are perfect and top-notch, we know that especially if you’ve been doing this for a while, that there’s going to come a time where you do need to involve support 

And getting on the phone with Airbnb or VRBO or especially booking.com is not the most pleasant experience. 

 So you do get a little bit of priority support if you are a premier host.

Now one last one, and this is a little subtle, hard to say how much impact this actually has. But VRBO does do promotions. Remember the OTAs, the online travel agencies, they spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to do their best to market your properties so that they get booked and they earn a commission.

And so from time to time, they’ll be sending out email promotions, things like that. They can be targeted based on cities. And if you do qualify as a premier host, then you’re much more likely to be included in some of these email and marketing efforts.

Now, let’s talk about an actual takeaway for most of you that maybe don’t have the premier host status, but you are heavily on Airbnb, well, you could snooze your Airbnb calendar. For a short period of time to get this status on VRBO helping you to balance out your property across the OTAs.

Now, this might sound like a crazy thing, and obviously you don’t wanna snooze your calendar to the very last second if you’re not getting reservations. But let’s say you’re booking window, the amount of time before someone books your property is quite long and you have a longer grace period. Well, you might consider just snoozing your listing on Airbnb again, if you’re already doing well on Airbnb so that you get more visibility on VRBO 

Because what happens is if you’re primarily booked on one channel. Then you’re very likely gonna continue to stay, booked more on that channel, and you may be missing out on some big opportunities if your calendar’s always booked, which is a great thing.

Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t leave any opportunity to get bookings on other platforms.

So just a quick tip for any of you out there that are looking for a little more diversification and remember, VRBO isn’t an amazing OTA in every market. It started as vacation rental by owners, so it is predominantly in vacation rental areas.

Of course, we always recommend that you’ve always got your property on VRBO, especially if you’re in the US South America, not so much Europe and those places, not so much. But if you’re in the us, especially if you’re in a vacation rental market, having the premier host status can go a long way to driving your visibility 

So this might not seem like a really big deal, especially if you’re not getting a lot of bookings on VRBO, but according to our account manager, these Premier host status can significantly boost your visibility, so it’s worth taking a look at. Until next time, I hope that gave you a little bit more insight and have a fab this week.

​Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. I’m happy you’re here again. If you tuned in last week, you know we dove into some really important questions, questions that we received from you, the audience in over 130 countries now,

I know these are questions that a lot of you are thinking, but you haven’t actually asked them. So today we’re gonna dive into part two of our q and a series. 

stay tuned as we dive into all of that in today’s show.

Well, first off, yeah, I just wanna welcome everyone. Uh, it’s been a really long time since we had some, some group calls like this, and I’m excited to say we’re gonna be doing these more regularly. We actually have a couple of our own partners that have joined Corely on the call. but lots of questions just in regards to everything.

And yeah, we’ll just jump into some of these questions one by one.

Let’s see. Uh, Kelly Addington asked, how are you leveraging ai? Do you have local inspectors? Is every home I inspected by an employee prior to guest arrival? What systems, tools, tech do you use? So yeah, lots of tech. Questions because there’s lots of tools and because it’s changing really quickly. so I mentioned one way that we’re leveraging it already is in guest communication, in terms of inspections.

So we use a program called Breezeway that’s designed for housekeeping turnovers. it allows us to create custom checklists. It also allows us to al to ask or require photos. and now we used to. We really highly encourage all of our car to join us, to take photos of every space of the property, both before and after.

 and I know, yeah, there’s some times where, you know, the photo’s not gonna show the little hair that’s like in the corner behind the bed, under the pillow or whatever. but what it does do is reinforce to the housekeeper. the importance, and there’s a couple other things that we do with housekeepers and terms of technology is, most of the time, our guests leave us great reviews.

Occasionally there’s something that pops up in the private feedback. maybe it is that. There was a little hair under the bed, in the corner or a dust bunny or whatever. and so that doesn’t go out on their public review, but it does go out on their private review. so one of our most recent updates, which I’m really excited about, is sharing that information with our housekeepers, uh, the private feedback.

 and this will be coming through the, the tool that we use in breezeway. and let’s say someone has like a, a portfolio properties, uh. And it just becomes kind of hard to keep track of if, or sending manually. And so instead, we have our housekeepers showing up now and before they go to clean that property, they can see that there were some prior feedback.

 so that’s one of our most recent ways, that we’re excited about again, requiring photos. In the very near future, we’re gonna be using AI to, to actually, monitor the photos. so that’ll be cool. Do you have local inspectors? we work with a lot of different partners in a lot of different places, and everyone has a little bit of a different setup.

Again, Sally, you know, we’re the backend core operations. but our partners have their own on the ground teams. housekeeping and maintenance. some of them do local inspections, some of them do not. some of them do inspections. Randomly, you know, so not every property. and so yeah, I guess that one’s all across the board.

 why would someone need to do an inspection? It’s really because the housekeeper didn’t do a good job, right? Or they, they left something behind or they forgot something. And so if you’re constantly having to do inspections for the same housekeeper and you’re constantly finding things. Then you need to have a talk with your housekeeper.

 and maybe you need to make a change, a change there. so I guess that would be my, my advice. let’s see. What systems tools do you use? Yeah, so we use breezeway for a lot of that coordination. also, yeah, for all housekeeping, checklists, everything like that.

 This is from Justin Warren. How do you find local boots on the ground support? What tools and resources do you use to identify and source local help? So I’m currently in, in Florida, in Orlando, and maybe what you could call the vacation rental capital of the world.

Uh, they have 75 million people visit here every year. Which is, is a lot. Right. Um, and so this is an incredibly competitive market, um, and actually just acquired a property here. Um, well, it’ll be interesting to see how it goes. Uh, it, our decision was to use it for personal use because we do spend a lot of time in South America, and so this is a bit of a, a stop over for us.

It’s, it’s got a direct flight basically to, to all the places where we spend time. Um, and so we’re in the process of furnishing this property. I’m, I’m, I’m in it today and, uh, we need a housekeeper. And so I used a tool called Perplexity. There’s lots of ways to find housekeepers, right? And the more short-term rentals there are on the market, the more options you’re likely going to have.

And so there’s a lot here. Uh, and I use a tool called Perplexity. Actually. It’s, it’s an AI tool like Chat, GBT or Gemini. And I just asked it. I said, where can I find a housekeeper for Orlando? Uh, and it found a Facebook forum so Perplexity can search websites for you. And on the Facebook forum, it was specifically for housekeepers, and there was a post there of someone that had already asked.

About housekeepers in Orlando. And so there were contacts there. So I sent a few text messages, uh, and then I made my own post and I said, Hey, my name’s Tim. I got a property, you know, message me if, if you’re interested. And I’m not kidding, but my phone just started ringing and ringing and for like, I actually deleted the post at the end of the night.

I edited it, I created a form where they could enter their information if they’re interested, so I could organize everything better. Um, that’s me kind of just being really techie. But, uh, long story short, we have lots of housekeeping contacts and literally a, you know, a day. And I, and it took me five minutes, like from finding that post to posting on Facebook.

Uh, it, it only took that long. And that is a national group. I think there were 160,000 people in it or something like that. So that’s one option. Uh, and you can do that for maintenance also. And, and a good tip is that a lot of housekeepers, um, that are professionals that are doing that for a living have maintenance contacts.

And they often have maintenance contacts that they prefer working with. Uh, and so it’s a really good idea to just ask them. Um, so referrals is a really big one. You know, when I, when we bought this property, uh, I asked my real estate agent, you know, Hey, do you know any local housekeepers? Do you know any local handyman?

And he wants the property to go well for me. And, and, and that’s what he specializes in. So of course he had some contacts as well. Um, so I would say that. Online, you know, finding people is, is, uh, easier than it’s ever been before. Now we’re, we’re gonna do a podcast, uh, in the very near future on finding housekeepers.

So I think I will save a little bit, uh, for that podcast so we can dive in deeper because there’s a lot of questions that you want to ask the housekeepers to make sure that. You’re all aligned, um, and that they’re going to work well for your property. So thanks Justin. Uh, great question. Really important one.

Let’s see. Uh, we’ve kind of gone through ai, uh, we’ve gone through some revenue management. We’ve gone through some task management and, um, some PMS questions. Um, here is. Another one from John Hicks. Thank you, John. Uh, we have had great difficulty obtaining homeowners insurance that covers both fire and liability.

Most insurance carriers were, uh, we’ve spoken to, don’t offer liability insurance because they consider short-term rentals too risky. We ended up getting a separate policy for liability. Um, okay. Sounds like, uh, John’s in California. That’s where I’m from originally. We’ve had. Yeah, so some places are tougher than others.

Uh, you know, California has obviously had lots of of wildfires, uh, and. Similarly, you know, the East Coast, Miami, Southern Florida have had lots of hurricanes, the Gulf area, and that’s made insurance really difficult for those places. There are some primary short-term rental lenders. Proper insurance is one, uh, safely, maybe doing short-term rental insurance.

There’s another one called Generality, uh, that’s been around for a long time. Insurance is one of those ones where you really just have to kind of dig in and research and, and yeah, it has gotten a lot more difficult. So, um, I, I would say that it’s very important that you are doing your due diligence and make sure that your policy coverage, the short-term rental, because there are lots of things, you know, most traditional insurance policies do not cover short-term rentals.

Uh, and even if your agent says that they do. If it’s not in writing, when push comes to shove, they, uh, they’re not going to enforce it. Right. So I think John, maybe for a little bit of help, you could try using an AI browser tool like this tool perplexity, which can search websites for you. And you could put in your exact situation, I have a property in California, this is the address.

Uh, you know, just give it all the context that you’ve given here and. It could help you find some resources. Um, but yeah, I don’t have an easy answer for that one. That that has gotten more, more difficult.

All right, lots of good questions here. Um. Let’s go with Joanna Woods. Uh, she says I’m about to onboard property number five. Awesome. Congrats Joanna. Uh, and the goal is 15 by the end of the year. Wow. Okay. That’s a big, that’s a lot. Uh, I’d like to know what you had to change to cope with more properties and how you go about employing the right people when you get to that point.

Great question. Um, well, if you go from five to 15 properties, you’re increasing all your operat operations by 300%, right? I mean, there’s literally three times more things that you’re going to need to do. Um, they don’t always happen at the same time. Uh, maybe you’re in a seasonal market. And so for part of the year things are quiet, but then the rest of the year they’re not.

Uh, that creates challenges for hiring. Hiring people and Yep. I went through these challenges before and a lot of our partners have, have joined us, uh, for this reason. Uh, because unfortunately at a smaller scale it doesn’t make financial sense most of the time. It depends on your average daily rates. You know, if you have some very luxurious properties, then you can afford it a lot easier, but majority of this make financial sense.

To hire a full team. Now I say a full team. A lot of people’s natural progression is to hire a virtual assistant. It’s a great option. That’s what I did. Um, but we have to set the right expectations. Um, if you’re expecting that virtual assistant to be on call, you know, seven days a week, or, you know. All day long, then it’s not realistic.

And you’ll probably see some churn. You know, they’re, they’re probably not gonna stick with you. The more properties you add, of course, um, the more work they’ll have. If, if, if, uh, you know, it is, it is manageable, but you do have that. You can’t have that churn if you don’t have the right expectations. Um, and then of course you have to train them, right.

There are a lot of VAs now available. You know, we’ve high, our, our team is completely virtual. Um, so we’ve got team members in the Philippines, in Eastern Europe who helps us with our content here right now is in South Africa. We have people in, uh, south America. Um, my partner’s Canadian. I mean, we’re based all over the place.

So that is one of the great things today is that you can. You can find people all over the world now, uh, but you still have to train them, right? Um, and part of training is having the experience to, to train them, you know? So depending on how long you’ve been managing the properties, you’ve got a lot of these things figured out.

But when you’re adding properties really quickly is what we found is there’s, there’s just a lot more to do and sometimes the training gets overlooked. Um, it’s not realistic to expect your VA to also be doing your revenue management. Uh, although a lot of people do this, um. But are their properties actually optimized?

Probably not. You know, uh, not saying that that doesn’t exist, but there’s basically, there’s, there’s quite a few roles to fill there, right? You need multiple receptionists to cover all the different shifts. If, if, you know, depending on how much time you’re still staying involved, um, if you’re working on all the different OTAs, they’ll all have different policies.

And so. There’s quite a bit there, but, uh, I would say the natural progression, Joanna, is to hire a va, uh, or to hire someone on the backend that, that can help with operations like that. Um, you know, like, like Cordley for example. Sorry for the, sorry for the plug there. Um, but great to hear you’re expanding quickly.

That’s awesome. Uh, let’s see here. How much time do we have? Okay. Another 15 minutes or so. Does anyone have any questions on anything that I’ve, that we’ve covered so far?

Be shy. Feel free to speak up. Can you speak more about what Cosley does? Yeah, sure. I love talking about our company. So, um, Cosley, uh, I mean the idea. Behind our name is that we’re this core operating center behind all of our partners properties. Um, and we’re handling the revenue management. We handle the technology, we handle the distribution, putting the properties on different listings, um, and we handle all the guest communications and everything like that.

Um, but we do it under our partner’s accounts, so we don’t actually own your account. You know, if, if things, if you want to sell the future for whatever reason you didn’t like working with us, then you can part ways. And that’s pretty different than a lot of traditional property managers. Uh, and then we are virtual, and so we do all that at a, at a discounted, um, rate.

So that’s kind of in a, in a nutshell, um, happy to jump on with anyone. Um. You can email me at, uh, or go to our website@atcorley.com and we can jump on a call. Uh, let’s see here. We did get quite a few questions on specific. Property scenarios. And so I’m gonna, I’m gonna skip those ones for now. Um, here’s another question from Mark and Jessica, do you still feel that a one to two bedroom property is, is the sweet spot?

So yeah, if Mark and, uh, if you guys have been. Following along the podcast for a long time. That’s where I started with a lot of my short-term rental portfolio. And things have definitely changed. And so yeah, this is, this is good. Why don’t we get into some industry sort of updates where, where things are at with the market.

Um, there was another question from, uh, Al that just says, to be or not to be in the short term rental game today, you know, uh, Airbnb bust. Is that a reality? So when I got started with short term rentals 11 years ago now, um. I was coming over from the long-term rental investment world and I had been focused on long-term rentals, but I realized that a lot of long-term rentals worked well as short-term rentals and they made significantly more revenue.

And so that’s what I did. But a lot of people have done that, uh, and the easiest properties to get into. Are the ones with the lowest barriers, the the ones that are least expensive, the ones that have more financing options, uh, and a lot of times those are the one and two bedrooms. And so what’s happened?

Well, as people discovered the returns with these smaller properties. The returns have gone down, and that’s just how the economy works, right? Uh, people chase higher returns until those returns go, go lower and lower, uh, to the point where someone will only continue renting a short term rental if the ex additional work that they’re putting into the property.

Is justified by the additional income that they’re making versus a long-term rental, which would be a lot less, lot less time. Um, now I don’t wanna lump all one and two bedrooms into a single group, uh, because there are one and two bedroom, uh, luxury cabins that are completely unique. Uh, and then there are the inner city one and two bedrooms, and those are totally different.

I mean, all of it. Really comes back to supply and demand. Like how many options does someone have and how different is your property? And so the, the latest conference I was at had a, um, a session on luxury properties like ultra luxury properties, and they’re doing very well. They’re doing very well. Uh, the one and two bedroom sector.

In heavily supplied areas, like bigger cities are not doing well. Uh, and from my personal experience, I, I, I can confirm that, you know, I have a lot of, uh, properties like that, that have seen market increases by 300%. And yes, I’m still operating above the market, but the market’s been going down. So I’m earning less money, but I’m earning more than the market.

Uh, and I have, um. Well, I’m actually selling a property without that short term rental, uh, to roll into some other funds or into some other projects. And so that’s just the nature of the game. Uh, it’s been over a decade and you really gotta make sure that where you’re buying, you’re comfortable with. Now there’s a lot of side benefits to short term rentals, right?

A lot of people are investing today purely because of the tax benefits, um, where you can get bonus depreciation, check with your CPA, of course. Uh, but ways to. Materially participate with your short-term rental, where you can use those deductions against your, your ordinary income. So if you’re W2 earner, airline, pilot, doctor, whatever it happens to be, uh, you can get some really significant tax gains and that could make it worth it by itself, even if the property’s not not cash flowing.

Um, so to get back to your question, yeah, one or two bedrooms still a sweet spot. It depends, uh, but in general, if it’s a commodity type property where they’re very similar, then I would say no. Uh, but that could also, you know, that goes for three, four, or five bedrooms. If there’s lots of them, then I would say I.

Say no. Uh, we can get that data today by going to air DNA and looking at supply and demand. So they have a really handy chart that says you can put in whatever city submarket that you want. You can see how many properties have been added. They go back three years. Uh, and in lots of these places you can see that the markets have added hundreds or thousands of units.

Now, that alone doesn’t mean that it’s a bad place to invest in. You’ve gotta look at one other piece. And the other piece is your average daily rate and your occupancy, or if you combine those two things, that’s what we call RevPAR. Uh, the total revenue, essentially that the property’s earning. And so if we’ve seen a market that’s increased substantially in supply.

It’s also increased in RevPAR then that’s fair game. Uh, and you can also sort that supply chart out by bedroom count. So you could look at one bedrooms, you could look at two bedrooms, uh, and they all operate a little bit differently within a market. Um. It’s interesting. I’m here in Orlando, you know, and I did a fair amount of research, uh, before jumping in here.

Again, this was not a pure investment decision for us. We’re, we’re gonna be staying here personally, and so wasn’t expecting to do, uh, do that well. Um. But there are not a lot of one bedrooms here. You know, Orlando is a place where families come to go to Disney or go to Universal Studios or all these different places, and they want multiple bedrooms and a lot of times multi-generations, you know, uh, multiple families staying in the same property, but there’s not a lot of one bedrooms.

Uh, and so a place here, you know, that could be a good option. Um, and of course, you know, one bedrooms. Two bedrooms are cheaper to furnish, there’s less furniture to put in there. And so all that goes into this equation. Uh, and the numbers ultimately are what, tell us if it’s a good investment or not. So quite a lot there, hopefully that, that, um, helps a little bit.

Uh, and kafa hopefully that helps answer your question, you know, to be or not to be in the short term rental gain. Uh, for me, my personal experience. Long-term rentals do not. I mean, it’s very rare. It’s, it’s much more difficult to find a long-term rental that cash flows versus a short-term rental. Uh, it just, versus, you know, years ago when prices were lower and interest rates were also lower.

Uh, it’s just incredibly challenging now to find long-term rentals. That makes sense. And so, should we be in the short-term rental game? It depends. Um. If you’re chasing higher returns, then there’s more opportunity still. Um, but it doesn’t mean that opportunity’s gonna be there forever. And then of course.

Performance, how we operate the property is a huge, huge driver in how well the property does. I mean, you can literally have, I say this all the time, but you can literally have two properties right next to each other and one the other one, even though they’re pretty much the same as a short-term rental, because one has much better reviews, they’re on all the platforms.

They have an amazing guest experience. Uh. It’s not like that in the long-term rental space, right? And so we do have an opportunity to operate our properties as best possible to o to, to maximize them as best possible. Um, and as long as those things are happening, then I think there’s much more opportunity than there is with traditional long-term rentals.

Hopefully that answers that. Let’s see, I think we got another question in the chat here. Uh. Are your services offered in Tulsa? So, yeah, we’re, we’re virtual Paul, uh, we’re, you know, we can be in any city and we have data and on literally every single property in the world, um, that’s on Airbnb or VRBO. So, uh, we can be in any property that, that, uh, we need to, uh, what is.

Uh, let’s see, here’s one from Lindsay. What is something you cons, Lindsay ar What is something you constantly have to educate your clients on regarding the industry? Um, yeah, good one. Uh, one thing that causes a lot of confusion for someone just getting started is around housekeeping, as we know.

Housekeeping fees used to be charged separately. Uh, looks like we just got four minutes, so we will take this as the last question, but this has been really great. There’s lots of, lots of good questions here and lots that I didn’t get to. So looking forward to doing this again. Um, but some common confusion around housekeeping.

So it used to be that housekeeping piece showed up in our listings when you booked an Airbnb. You had, you know, $500 for the reservation, a hundred dollars and $150 for a housekeeping fee, it was $650. It’s not like that anymore. It’s now just $650. Right? That’s what the guest sees. That’s the total reservation cost.

Exactly the same way the hotel industry works and has always worked. You know, they’ve never charged a separate housekeeping fee. A lot of people, when they get started with a short-term rental, look at their housekeeping expenses and use that. Uh, what they’re going to charge for their housekeeping fee.

Uh, but that can really mess with your potential to get your property booked. Um, and I know housekeeping costs have gone up, you know, costs in general have gone up, right? Inflation, everything’s more expensive than it used to be. Um, but we have to look at the total reservation price. And so we don’t wanna be charging a housekeeping fee again that the guest hasn’t seen, but it’s raising that average reservation price.

To a point where no one’s gonna book your property because maybe your reservation or your total cost for the reservation is now 10% more than your neighbor. And if you’re in a really competitive market, you’re not gonna get booked. That’s just how, how it is. And so that’s something that constantly comes up, at least with, with new owners, uh, that join us, is that unfortunately.

Your costs on the housekeeping, uh, don’t impact what we can charge a guest and expect to get booked. And I’ll add just one quick last one here, um, before we jump off. That’s similar. So a lot of you that have nice vacation rentals or in very typical vacation rental markets. You charge damage waivers, uh, instead of collecting a deposit.

And those damage waivers can range from 50 to a hundred dollars. That’s charged to the guest. If you’re with a company like Evolve Vacation Rentals, for example, they make it mandatory. Uh, and they also collect the fee from what I understand. So, but it does price, uh, and if you’re in a. A copy type property where let’s just say you’re renting for $125 a night.

It’s a low season, the market’s hardly occupied, but then you tack another a hundred dollars on or $75 for a image wave. And so a two night reservation goes from $250 to $325. You just significantly raise the total cost of that reservation. And again, if you’re. In a competitive market, it’s very unlikely that you’re gonna get booked.

Um, so I think that’s a common misconception is our costs, uh, they should drive our investment decisions, but they shouldn’t drive our pricing decisions with our guests. Um, because if they’re not, if they’re not calculated properly, it basically means that your, your property’s not gonna earn, uh, as much money as it should.

So. That was great. Thank you everyone, uh, for joining. I can’t believe I’ve been babbling for an hour already, but, uh, hopefully you found some value in that. Uh, lots of good questions. We’ve got lots still on our list that are saved here. Um, and. Yeah. Thank you for joining and, and look for, we look forward to doing this again, so we will, we’ll send out some reminders and if you do have any questions, please reach out to us.

Uh, you can go to corley.com, CRZ y.com and uh, look forward to seeing everyone next time. Take care.

Well, welcome everyone. I’m glad you’re here today. My name’s Tim Hubbard. I’m the CEO of Cosley. Also the host of the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast, where a lot of you may have found us through. There’s a lot of questions in the short-term rental space and we talk with managers and owners and investors.

Every single day. And we also manage over a couple hundred properties. And so we’ve got a lot of insights and I’m looking forward just to having a casual conversation around the questions that you’ve already submitted.

So let’s go ahead and jump into it.

Well, first off, yeah, I just wanna welcome everyone. Uh, it’s been a really long time since we had some, some group calls like this, and I’m excited to say we’re gonna be doing these more regularly. We actually have a couple of our own partners that have joined Corely on the call. but lots of questions just in regards to everything.

And yeah, we’ll just jump into some of these questions one by one. And I guess, yeah, before we get started, for anyone that I haven’t met before, my name’s Tim Hubbard. I’m the the CEO and Co-founder of Cosley uh Cosley. Our name comes from this idea of being your core operating center on the back end of all your short-term rentals. So I. You know, we’re making the pricing decisions.

Uh, we’re handling the guests, we’re handling task management. Uh, and excited to say we work with a lot of partners now in over 40 cities, which also gives us a lot of really good insight. And so along with our partners properties, uh, my properties, we’ve got some real world advice. Um, and, excited to share that today.

So, why don’t I. Just start off with this first one that has to do with pricing, and this came from Mark, uh, DaVita. Thanks for submitting this. It says, do you have any experience with hospitable Dynamic pricing tool? I currently use Price Labs, so for those of you don’t know, hospitable is a PMS program.

Uh, actually, I think I interviewed their, their founder, uh, not too long ago on the podcast. What is my experience with their dynamic pricing tool? Well, I can’t say that I have personal experience with their tool, um, but I know every PMS essentially has a dynamic pricing tool.

And why do they have it? Because. Dynamic pricing is an essential now, um, and a lot of the property management software companies have realized that their users are not using a dynamic pricing tool. So if you signed up for Hospitable, for example, you can hospitable, can see if you’re connected to Price Labs.

And if you’re not, then they wanna sell you the pricing tool. That’s just how it works. They want to, they want to get more from all their current users. Um. Price Labs only does dynamic pricing and that’s all they’ve ever done. Uh, and so for me, a company that’s focused specifically on one thing and doing that thing very well is usually always gonna have a better outcome at that one thing.

But we also use some other data pricing tools and there’s some. There’s some challenges with dynamic pricing tools. Uh, I also had the founder Price Price Labs on the podcast, so you guys can go back and check that one out.

But some of the main challenges with revenue management that we’ve identified is first of all. The data’s not a hundred percent accurate, so it’s scraped data, uh, meaning that they look at your Airbnb listing or VRBO listing. Most of these platforms are only looking at that data,

So the first thing is that the data’s not a hundred percent scraping means that they’re looking at your calendar, they’re seeing what your price is. They’re scraping that data and if your calendar becomes blocked, then they assume that you rented that night. Uh, but we all know, uh, at least about those that have been in the space.

There are lots of reasons why we block our calendar. Maybe, uh, there was a maintenance issue, maybe, you know, whatever it happens to be. You know, there’s a list of reasons. Maybe we’re using it personally for like two months. Uh, and so. That data is skewed. And, and that’s the same for Price Labs.

That’s the same for Wheelhouse, that’s the same for, um, really any dynamic pricing tool, air DNA. So what we like to do internally is we like to look at all the data we have access to, to make a decision. The more data we have, the more confident we can be with it. So I hope that helped answer that question a little bit, um, while we’re on the pricing topic.

A couple other things that we’ve noticed that are lacking in the dynamic pricing tools. For one, they don’t account for your review scores. I know we got lots of questions today on reviews as well. Uh, and rightly so. They are one of the main points to driving your visibility for your property. Uh, and we know that more visibility with our property means more people are looking at it and more people are booking it, which means the property, should be earning more money.

Um, and so to have a dynamic pricing. Strategy that does not incorporate that is a pretty big, pretty big miss. , Excited at Sly, we’ve got a tech team with us now. We’re, uh, bridging a lot of these gaps, and so that’s one of the things that we incorporate also a brand new property.

If you have a brand new property that just entered a market and it has no reviews and your competition has 55 star reviews, that’s different, right? So your pricing has to constantly be changing. so highly recommend using a pricing tool.

Uh, and then I’ll just leave you with one last. Flaw that we’ve found with revenue management and a lot of the current management practices is that it does a really, it does a good job at adjusting your daily price. Right. You know, just like an airline, if there’s an event in town, uh, if it’s a, a weekend versus the weekday, if someone’s booking five months out from now versus right now, , it’s adjusting all those prices, you know, based on market data and demand, but it’s adjusting.

Based off a base price. That’s what Price Labs calls it, a base price. So you launch a property and you say, yeah, I think my property should earn $200 a night. That is the base price at which the dynamic tool is, is adjusting it every day, uh, either up or down. But if your base price isn’t right. Then that means you’re adjusting off like a faulty base.

Right? And so the way that we account for this is by looking at market data and anyone using Price labs, anyone using their DNA, uh, or the tools out there, you can get access to market data. And if you are getting booked up much faster than your market 

, you’re probably not priced high enough, right? And then the opposite is true. If the market’s getting booked and you’re not getting booked, then your prices are probably too high. Uh, and so we look at those things and we adjust that base price accordingly.

Again, all based off, off market data, um, that is really our. Our benchmark, you know, for how a property is done. And if you’re in a market where there’s not a lot of data, then there’s a lot of testing that goes on, right? But again, you have to be adjusting that base price to truly know if you’re maximizing prices, or not.

Uh, of course if you have historical data, that’s always a big help too.

We’ve got some other pricing questions here. Here’s one from Ann says, how far do you turn on your dynamic pricing? how far out do you turn it on? So our dynamic pricing is turned on for all of our available nights.

Uh, we wouldn’t wanna have our property open for the next 12 months, for example, and only have dynamic pricing turned on for 10 months. Um, so that’s a pretty easy one. We wanna make sure it’s, it’s turned on. All the time.

, This one’s from Mohammed. Uh, I want to learn about revenue management.

Um, well, it is, uh, it is a bit of a study. Um, you know, it didn’t used to be that way, but it should be that way, you know, in a hotel. It’s the second highest paid position after the general manager, the person that runs the hotel, for example. Um, but we know, like in the airline industry, I mean this, this is where we see dynamic pricing going.

We see it all being run by machines, right? I mean, you don’t have someone at American Airlines that’s like, ah, I’m gonna. I’m gonna add a 5% discount on my Dallas to Charlotte flight today. Uh, it’s all pulled off from data, right? And of course that’s, that’s really, really complex. These dynamic pricing tools are allowing us to do a lot of these things easier.

But at the end of the day, um. Algorithms that can act accurately predict all this based off information is where the, where the industry’s headed. Um, so if you’re not using dynamic price right now, it’s a huge advantage to jump on those tools. Uh, if you do jump on it, uh, there is a lot to learn.

You know, these, these tools have a lot of it built in themselves, but make sure that you’re keeping account for some of the things that those tools don’t, currently incorporate.

Okay, I think that’s, that’s a fair amount on pricing. 

 there are a lot of guest management, uh, questions. Um, so, you know, there’s really three parts to having an optimum property. we have to have a really good listing, one that stands out. we have to have really good pricing, but if we have a really good listing and we have really good pricing, all the things we just talked about, but we don’t have.

Good guest management, then your property’s not gonna do well, unfortunately. So guest management is critical. I think a core component to starting with that is setting the right expectations, right? So we don’t wanna advertise something in our property that’s, that’s not there. if the backyard does not look great.

People are still gonna see the backyard when they check in your property. So, we always encourage everyone to represent their property exactly as it is. Doesn’t mean you need to put the backyard photos like your header photo, of course. but we wanna make sure we have it in there.

 this question came from, Beth Russell. she said she has one property. what if any PMS should I use. Well, that’s a good question. with one property, you know, the, the need for PMS is, is a lot less than, you know, even with two properties. I always highly recommend using technology because it helps us, it helps us create better guest experiences, be more efficient.

I worked my, my prior life, uh, I worked for a software company in a different industry with, um, automotive shops. And w and I sold business management software similar to what you, you would see in A PMS. The software I worked with helped manage the businesses and what I found consistently, the ones that really embraced technology.

they had better customer experiences, so in our case, guest experience, they made more money, and they were less stressed out and everything was more efficient. So I highly recommend using, a tool. Uh, there’s several PMSs that can work really well for smaller amounts of properties. Hospitable is one that’s kind of catered towards, smaller portfolios.

Host away and Guesty are probably two of the biggest ones in the industry right now. Um, there are new ones popping up that promise. A lot of AI technology, which we’ll get to that in a second too. That’s another common theme that came up. but the reality is none of them are perfect. Right. just coming back to the original question on using, hospits dynamic pricing tool, they built that tool to accommodate.

Better tool, basically. And so all of these PMS programs are trying to do that with every, every feature. we internally used to use guestie Great program. we currently use Host Away, which we feel is one of the leading software programs. I mean, they’re valued over a billion dollars. They’ve raised over $500 million.

 and so they’ve got a lot of, Resources to continue adapting their, their software. But any of those would, would be good. And, and the main things that those are helping with are channel management, right? To help you get on all these different OTA platforms, which is a really big piece of your performance with the property,

So I would check out any of those.

 here’s one from Laura Lopez says, are you still using Notion? At your pretty database, please share how it’s used. So, uh, Laura I would imagine is probably a long time podcast listener. ’cause I’ve pretty much talked about everything I was doing in my personal portfolio and, this notion episode came out a long time ago.

The answer is no. we do not use Notion as our property database, although I do think notion, for any of of you that don’t know, it’s essentially a program that allows you to organize all your notes, all your data, your video, your links, your files, everything that you can imagine in, in lots of visually pleasing ways.

 and they’ve branched out to connect with all kinds of other software, but, they’re not designed specifically for short-term rentals. Uh, and because we manage a whole lot of short-term rentals, it’s imperative that we have our information a hundred percent accurate.

And so we currently use a program called Conduit, that houses, Well, we’re building our own internal database, I guess is the, the long story short. we do have developers on our team now, and, the reason that we’re building our own internal database is because we do use multiple programs in the industry.

Which we think that any serious operator has to be doing. That kind of goes back to that idea of using, using the best tools. but those tools don’t all fully integrate all of the information with each other. so Hostway, for example, is a PMS that integrates with the OTAs or the online travel.

Agencies like Airbnb or booking.com. but it doesn’t actually integrate a hundred percent of the information. and then we’re using this tool I mentioned called Conduit, which is an AI tool that helps us with some guest messaging. And, it also stores required information for property, but it’s slightly different than what’s in the property management software.

So hopefully I’m not losing people here. But the idea here is that. Each of these tools has its own data that it needs, and it’s not all the same. So we’re basically building our own central database. and you could do this with notion still, I mean, if you’re managing, a smaller amount of properties, notion has a lot of flexibility, to track information properly.

 so nope, not using that anymore. we’ve brought things in-house, but I still love that program. it’s, I use it every single day.

So let’s see what else we have on guest management. Jenna Jacobson best reservation management system to handle guest communication. Um, so this is something that’s, that’s changing. it’s changing because AI’s entered the space, right? And one of the things that AI is excelling at.

More so in any than any other industry is customer support. and I know a lot of us may have the idea of like really bad chat bots, or entering, you know, customer support with like Comcast and getting an AI agent that asks the same question like 10 times. That’s not the reality today. Reality today is that there are.

Really, really good LLMs or language learning models, that can answer questions a lot of times better than, than humans can more consistently, you know, they don’t forget things. They can access unlimited amounts of data. and so in terms of guest management with messages. It used to be a PMS, so you know, hostway or hospitable you would use to help you manage those messages.

And that’s still a really good tool. But most of those are not as developed with ai, as. Tools built specifically for customer support or guest support. they have what you would call automations, you know, so they have ways to automate check-in instructions, for example. or they could automate, a request for review, but we know that those automations don’t fit every guest equally.

 let’s just say your check-in time is 3:00 PM and. The guest doesn’t arrive till midnight. Maybe they have a late flight or something like that. If you use a programmed automation, maybe it was set to send a follow up at 8:00 PM to say, Hey, Josh, just wanna make sure you checked on the property.

Okay, but they already sent you a message that said they weren’t showing up till midnight. Well, that doesn’t look that great, right? and that’s something that most. PMS programs are still not able to accurately, handle, because they haven’t involved all the AI yet. So with AI it can read the messages and see, oh yeah, Josh said he is coming at midnight.

It ends it at 12:30 AM So there’s just so much more flexibility with ai, uh, to the point where we don’t use our PMS for messaging anymore. the internal tools and host away, we do not feel our nearly as, as good as the ones that we’re using outside.

In a tool called Conduit. and so there are a lot of AI tools being developed specifically for the short-term rental industry.

 one of the big promises that you’ll see is that they automate 95% of all your guest communication. You know, you can set up a property, you turn this thing on, it knows everything. But we know that that’s not the truth. there’s lots of situations where we need humans involved, to.

Handle tougher decisions. maybe there’s information that a guest asks that you don’t have stored in your database, so there’s no way for it actually to answer. all these things we handle on the backend through escalations. You know, we have, we spend hours and hours literally every single day, adjusting this, testing this.

And just the side of testing it is really challenging. So, um, we test with my properties, which is nice. I know not everyone has, test properties around. but we do that. We have quality control, and we’re just constantly, constantly, messing with it. AI programmers have promised that.

Yes, maybe they do a really good job at sending the basic information, like, you know, Hey, what’s the wifi password? Or, what’s the code to get into your property? but where they don’t automate things is. When you have complex workflows, so let’s say just as an example that you wanna allow early check-ins at your property.

We know, basically everyone asks for an early check-in, right? And basically everyone asks for a late checkout. I’m guilty. I do it as well, whether I’m at a hotel or a short-term rental. But there’s a lot that goes into that. first of all, we need to make sure the property’s available, if it’s available.

Has it been cleaned? Did we just have someone check out? how far in advance does the guest actually wanna check in? Maybe it’s like eight hours in advance, where. It’s justified for us to charge them extra and the guests would be willing to pay extra. but then how much do we actually charge the guests?

 do we charge them on as a percentage of what the nightly rate would be? Or do we charge them on like an hourly basis? So you can see how some of these workflows get really, really complex, and these are everyday things like literally everyone asks for, a check-in and, and maybe your process isn’t, isn’t that complex.

 But for a lot of people it is, or you know, for larger portfolios it is. So that’s the part that is not being, that’s not accurate. When you’re looking at AI tools in the market today, when they say that they’re automating 95% or whatever it happens to be, they’re considering just the basic guest messaging.

 So hopefully that gave you a little clarity. I think it’s a super exciting space because, it’s improving the guest experience, you know, assuming we have all of our information accurate, right? and if you are building a portfolio, whereas we had multiple people responding throughout a guest stay, maybe it’s a week long stay, if you have someone helping you, you have multiple people helping you, there’s different.

Tones that maybe were going out, maybe someone gets sick. And so the messages was delayed a little bit. And so there’s all kinds of benefits from, from ai and it’s, it’s getting better by the day. I mean, it is really, really impressive.

Well, we received a ton of really good and important questions. Questions that are undoubtedly on a lot of your minds that didn’t actually ask them as much as I would love to answer all of them in this episode. As you know, most of our episodes are quick and actionable,

so we’re gonna go ahead and save some other important questions for a part two.

Stay tuned. As we jump into those next week

There is a pet friendly debate going on in the short term rental world. Some of you swear by the increases in your bookings, while others are fearing the damage from hosting pets. So today we’re gonna answer the question, should I allow pets in my property? And we’re gonna cover all the bases, what you should be charging, damage considerations, housekeeping considerations.

So stay tuned as we dive into all that in today’s show.

Well, welcome back. We’re gonna break down everything you need to know about allowing pets at your short-term rental property. But before we do, let’s just start off with the big one, the nice one. The positive one is that you will see very. Big boosts in your visibility. If you allow pets at your property, and this is really easy to see, you can simply go to Airbnb, you can pull up your market, you can see how many properties are there, you can select the pet filter, and then you can see how many disappear.

So for those of you catching the audio only version, I’ve got my computer screen pulled up. I put in Destin, Florida, a very popular vacation rental destination in the us. I zoomed in on a map location that’s currently giving me over a thousand homes within that map area. Now, if I go to this little filters button, Airbnb’s filters, and I scroll down just a little bit and I click the Allow pets button.

That thousand homes drops to 484 for this map location that I’ve selected. Now imagine you’re one of those 484, and imagine all the people that love to travel with their furry little friends.

So the visibility boosts are massive, and you can do this across a whole bunch of different markets and see that very often, as many as 70% of the listings in that market do not allow pets

The other bright side of this for you hosts out there allowing pets, is that you can very often charge more. We’re gonna get to that in just a second, but before we do, let’s talk about the housekeeping consideration.

Because I know a lot of you are thinking, I have allergies. I don’t want to accept them. My housekeeper would kill me if I turned on the pet filter. And that is the reality for a lot of you. But if you’re struggling in a market, you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do. So take a look at your market, see how many properties are not allowing pets.

And decide whether or not you want to, if you’re charging more for that reservation, well, you could also afford to pay your housekeeper a little bit more.

If you are renting a property for a little bit longer, will then our team and I highly recommend that you have a bit of a midterm. Cleaning and you can charge us back to your guests. Make sure it’s in your rental agreement or your house rules. But it’s a way for you to check in on the property. And of course, you want to have a camera at your entrance of your property as well to make sure if your guests said they were showing up with one little Chihuahua, they didn’t show up with four great Danes.

So let’s get to the financial side of things. Yes, you very often can charge more, but it depends. And what does it depend on? It depends on your market and how many other people are already allowing for pets. So you want to use a tool like Price Labs or Air DNA to find this information and you want to build some comp sets of other properties that allow for pets.

And if some top performing properties in your market are allowing for pets and you’re already charging the same rate, then unfortunately you’re probably not going to be able to charge more for allowing pets.

Because when we add a pet fee, it’s really adding to our overall reservation price and people are booking our properties based on the overall reservation price. As you probably know, housekeeping fees, for example, don’t show up in the total price anymore,

so you’ve gotta consider that. But let’s assume that you do have the flexibility because most of the people in that market are not allowing pet. You have some options when it comes to charging for pets, and it does vary a little bit depending on the OTA or the online travel agency. Airbnb, for example,

 allows you to charge a flat rate that spread across the reservation, But that rate cannot exceed your average daily rate. So if you’re charging a hundred dollars per night, you can’t charge a $300 pet fee,

although there is one little workaround you can charge based on what you have in your rental agreement or what Airbnb refers to as their house rules. So let’s say you wanted to charge for two pets. And you allowed up to two pets. Well, you can simply have that in your rental agreement that it’s $50 per night per pet.

And if your guest books your property, they accept those terms and you can charge them via the resolution center for those extra fees.

Now VRBO has a lot more flexibility. You can charge a per stay price. You can charge a per pet price, or you can charge a per night price.

booking.com. Not so easy. Most of you are collecting payments on booking.com through a platform like Stripe, although booking.com does have payments by booking available, depending on the market and depending on your account. But let’s imagine that you are collecting the payments from booking.com, then you do have flexibility similar to putting those arrangements in your house rules.

You put that in your rental agreement on booking.com.

 Next up we wanna make sure that we have some good rules in place. So rules around pets could be size and breed restrictions, could be the number of pets. If you’re on Airbnb, you wanna make sure these are in your house rules. If you’re using a platform outside of that, this is going to be in your rental agreement.

I am gonna go ahead and just read our rules off. I am gonna go ahead and just read our pet rule off to you. You’re more than welcome to copy this, and you’re more than welcome to grab the link in the show notes with all of our house rules that you can use as a template. So ours, if we’re allowing pets in a particular property, it says This is a pet friendly property.

We’re glad if you were able to bring your pet along, but please note we have a few additional rules. Please note that a $50 pet fee will be applied per pet. This helps us get around Airbnb’s flat PET price. Please disclose pets at the time of booking. All pets must be added, your reservation, so the applicable pet fee can be applied.

We are unable to host cats and breeds of dogs deemed aggressive per our insurance policy. No more than two animals. No larger than 20 pounds. Pets are not allowed on furniture. And please clean up after your pets. Do not leave your pet home alone unless crated.

So quite a few potential pet rules in there for you to choose from. Of course, you don’t need to have all of those, but it is good to consider all of them.

Okay, so let’s assume that you decided to allow pets at your property. There’s a couple other things that we want to put in place when it comes to damage protection.

We always recommend having either a damaged waiver, which you can use a company like Wavo or Safely or charging a deposit. Now, if you’re accepting pets, you may want to consider raising that deposit just a little bit. And one of the nice things about a deposit is it’s not raising your total reservation price, right?

So you’re staying more competitive with your local market. But you’re also providing a little bit more protection on the backend.

One last tip. You do wanna make sure that your short-term rental property insurance policy covers pets.

Some policies exclude it entirely, and I know these policies are like a thousand pages these days. So another quick tip, just download that PDF document, give it to chat PT and say, Hey, Mr. Chat PT. Please give me any verbiage that excludes or restricts pets staying at my property.

All right. With those precautions in place, you wanna make sure that you’re marketing your property well online, remember, we wanna stand out. That’s the name of the game because there’s a bajillion short-term rentals out in the world these days, but there’s a lot less. That allow pets. So if that is you, consider adding some photos with pets in your listing.

Consider adding some pet amenities, you know, dog food bowls, all those types of things, doggie, dooo bags and leashes.

 Add the nearest dog park to your local map. Maybe even have a little pet welcome basket.

Those will go a long way, and they will surely help your reviews. Now for all of you out there like, Tim, I don’t care about the visibility or earning more money. I’m just not going to allow pets.

Well, the reality is pets are still going to stay at your property and they will come in the form of a service animal. According to Airbnb’s policies. A service animal doesn’t even necessarily need to be a dog. It could be a cat or a bunny rabbit, or a small horse.Yes, there are no restrictions on service animals, and you are also very limited at what you can and cannot ask someone that’s bringing a service animal.

Now service animals different than emotional support animal. We’ll get to that in just one second. There are only two questions you can ask a guest Bringing a service animal. One is, is if they have the service animal based on a disability.

The first question is. Is a service animal required because of a disability,

and the second is what service task has that animal been trained to do? Now, sometimes by asking these questions, you might filter out some people that are trying to bring a service animal. It’s not actually a service animal, but outside of that, you really don’t have any flexibility, and yes, you’re going to have people staying at your property.

With service animals. Now, what’s the risk of denying them or asking them more questions? Is that your listing can get taken down from Airbnb’s site or any OTA site that has these restrictions, which most of them do it in the form of discrimination. If you don’t allow someone at your property that has a service animal, Airbnb will take you down via their discrimination policy.

so if a guest says they’re coming with a service animal, or you saw them checking into the property on camera and they showed up with a dog and they said, it’s a service animal, you can’t require documentation. You can’t ask for certification. It is very restricted.

Now, where you do have some flexibility is when someone says they’re showing up with an emotional support animal.

Otherwise known as an ESA

with an e, s, a, you do have flexibility. You can ask questions, you can charge. You can’t charge for a service animal.

You can apply your standard pet policies. Now, keep in mind, if you get damage from any type of animal, whether it’s a service animal or emotional support animal, you still have a right to charge for that damage.

If you happen to be in New York or in California, well, I’m sorry, but yeah. Emotional support animals for you are treated just like a service animal. So we wanna make sure we know these little details. To recap, in a nutshell, we want to check our market, see how many properties are actually filtered out. We want to talk to our housekeepers and make sure that they’re comfortable and we’ve worked something out so that they know we’re going to have pets staying at our property.

We need to look at our market data to see how much more we can actually charge. We need to have the right policies in place.

If you want to use our House rules template, just grab them in the link below. We wanna make sure we have some protection in place in case there are damages. So that would be in the form of a deposit or a damage waiver. Of course, you want to check with your insurance. And then lastly, you just want to make sure you or your team or whoever’s helping you out.

Understands the difference between an emotional support animal and a service animal. If you don’t wanna look into all this stuff yourself, well, our team would be happy to help you out with it. We’ve managed properties in over 40 cities, over 60,000 guests now, which you better believe a lot of those showed up with pets.

A lot of them showed up with pets without letting us know. But because we have the right policies in place, we’re able to charge appropriately. You can partner with us by going to st riches.com. There’s a little link there. I’d love to chat with you personally. I hope these insights helped you answer the question, should I or should I not allow pets in my property in 2026? Until next time, I hope you have a fabulous week.

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

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

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

You became friends perhaps.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I look forward to staying connected. Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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